


Mise en Place

by bankrobbery



Category: The Old Guard (Comics), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Restaurant, Falling In Love, M/M, Mutual Pining, Self-Discovery, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-24
Updated: 2020-09-19
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:00:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 27,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26093014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bankrobbery/pseuds/bankrobbery
Summary: "Cooking is like love; it should be entered into with abandon or not at all.” - Harriet Van Horne.Nicky is a cook. Joe is a server. Joe is also kind, and exceptionally charming, and disastrously funny, and Nicky falls for him between one dinner service and the next.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 125
Kudos: 347
Collections: Star Crossed Immortals





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> I'm really making an uneducated guess about how many chapters this is going to be. Don't hold to me to anything. I'm just here to watch these two idiots fall in love in every universe imaginable.

There are many places this story could start, but the beginning is not one of them. The beginning is on a Wednesday in October, nearly one year ago; the beginning is on a cool morning, with the city blanketed in soggy leaves and slippery pavement as a reminder that the last day of summer was weeks ago. This story doesn’t start at the beginning, but if it did then it would start with the attractive young woman who bursts out of a tall office building in the middle of downtown, her fashionably bright red raincoat flapping out behind her from where the buttons have come undone. Her arms clutch a saran-wrapped stack of paper folders to her chest, her umbrella tucked awkwardly underneath one elbow, and all it takes is a single wayward muddy puddle to send her sliding haphazardly into an unsuspecting Nicky Smith. 

Nicky doesn’t see her until it’s far too late to do anything about it. His life has been a downward spiral of disappointment ever since he signed up for that 7 a.m. World History class that he has been habitually late for every single day this semester. He finds himself spending most of his mornings fighting against an alarm clock that is desperate for him to get his life together, and wondering why he spent money on a bus pass that he can never seem to get up in time to make. He’d woken up that morning just in time to watch the 720 bus roll past his apartment and had watched it go down the street with pure unadulterated ambivalence. So he thinks maybe the young woman who runs into him is late too, with her arms full of everything, and it’s just unfortunate that today was the day that she attempted to share a sidewalk with Nicky’s own personal brand of human disaster. Their collision is basically doomed to happen.

The young woman, petite as she is, still manages to knock both Nicky and his coffee onto the concrete in one fell swoop like it’s nothing. Nicky’s coffee ends up half down the front of his jacket and half spilling down the sidewalk and into the gutter, never to be seen again. There’s coffee down his sleeve and vanishing into the dark wash of his jeans, which are trying their hardest to also soak up all of the water on the sidewalk like they’re made of sponges. 

“Oh my god!” the woman gasps in a rush of breath, and the look on her face says that this is not the first mishap she’s had to weather today. There is increasing panic evident in her expression as she slowly seems to realize that this is her real life, playing out before her like the bad punchline to a sitcom episode, and Nicky gets the distinct impression that maybe he’s not the only one who has these sorts of let-downs as a constant in his day-to-day schedule. She slides the armful of files underneath one arm, her umbrella falling uselessly onto the concrete, and she awkwardly grabs onto Nicky’s right arm in an attempt at helping him back to his feet. “I’m so sorry! Are you all right?”

Nicky does manage to get onto his feet. The woman is surprisingly strong. 

His back is wet, all the way down to the ankles of his jeans, but it’s just water and he’s no worse for wear. It’s just enough of a shift in his regularly scheduled programming for him to consider it a sign from the universe that he should skip class again today and crawl back into bed to sleep until two. He’s not sure how many more classes he can miss this semester and still achieve a passable grade, but he’s probably dancing on or near that threshold already. 

“Oh sweet baby Jesus,” raincoat lady mutters mostly to herself, and the expression her face is pulling into looks oddly painful as she continues to assess the extent of the damage she’s done. “Your clothes. Your _coffee_.”

“Hey, it’s fine, it’s not a big deal,” Nicky reassures her, voice gentle, desperate to salvage the situation before she becomes any further distraught. His clothes will wash, will dry, and he can always get more coffee. In the scheme of life his problems are very, very tiny. He attempts to give the woman a friendly, reassuring smile, but maybe he needs more practice because she ends up looking even more distressed than before. “No, really, I should’ve been watching where I was going. Are you okay? You seem… not okay.”

“You are letting me buy you a new coffee, at the very least,” raincoat lady demands, ignoring his reassurances entirely, and, even as Nicky opens his mouth to protest, she is already curling slender fingers around the sleeve of his jacket and pulling him down the sidewalk. He stumbles after her, half because he thinks if he dug his heels down and refused to move it would probably knock them both back over again and half because he’s a poor college student and not above free coffee - or, rather, free anything. 

The small cafe she drags Nicky into is squashed between the office building she had just come from and a bookstore that doesn’t open for another two hours. The name of the cafe is in French, something with too many consonants and accent marks, and she pushes the glass door open with her shoulder, an uneasy smile on her lips. There are bells above the door that chime lightly when they stumble into the entrance, scuffing their shoes briefly against the floor mat in front of the door as they go, and Nicky is immediately greeted by a burst of warm air that smells like sweet coffee and yeast. 

“Please sit,” raincoat lady insists, gesturing haphazardly at one of the tiny tables lining the window front. “How do you like your coffee?”

“Quyhn, you’re tracking all over the floor!” a middle aged woman at the counter pipes in, voice heavy with an accent that is assuredly not French and a weird sort of resignation on her face, as though she expects nothing less at this point. She regards the frazzled raincoat lady - who must be Quyhn, because they’re the only people in the cafe currently - for a moment, lips pursed tightly together, and then she asks, as though she would rather not know the answer, “What did you do to this poor man? Shove him into the gutter?”

Quyhn casts a quick glance skyward and turns her back to the woman, as though willing her out of existence, and focuses her entire attention back on Nicky and her own personal mission. 

“Coffee!” she says, to pull them back on topic, and her smile is warm. “I’m buying you coffee. Only-” and she stops to rummage around in the pockets of her coat, producing a crumpled five dollar bill which she places on the tiny table Nicky is seated at, “-I’m so sorry, I have all these interviews and I’m going to be very late to the first one. Alana will take very good care of you, just let her know whatever you like - everything is fantastic here, I promise - and I’m so sorry, because this is unbelievably rude, but my wife is going to have an aneurysm if I don’t hire-” and she pauses again and produces a piece of printer paper in a flourish from one of the many folders still tucked underneath her arm. She hands the paper to Nicky and smiles encouragingly. “Actually, just in case, if you know anyone - or if you’re interested - we’re opening in a week and I have no one. Post it on your campus, post it in your laundry room, I’m one hundred percent desperate. My number is at the bottom and I’m available any hour. Don’t even hesitate.”

Nicky stares at the paper, then at the money wadded up on the table, and then finally at Quyhn. He hopes his expression accurately portrays how overwhelmed he feels, but Quyhn is already vanishing out the open glass door in a flourish of bright red and fluttering paperwork, the chiming of bells and rush of cold, moist air ushering her out.

The woman at the counter, who must be Alana, huffs out another sigh and turns her attention from the door to Nicky. She says, not unfondly, “Poor thing. Overworked. Crazy, but nice.”

It takes only minutes for Nicky to get a new coffee, with steamed milk and two pumps of toffee syrup, pressed into his hands in a cream colored paper cup with the cafe’s logo stamped on the side in pink. Alana also hands him a stack of napkins to dry off with and a Kraft paper bag that contains something that looks suspiciously pastry-like in nature. Nicky considers trying to hand it back, because he’s pretty sure his crumpled five dollars couldn’t have possibly cover coffee and a pastry anywhere outside of 7-11, but it smells so good he doesn’t have the willpower to try and politely hand it back. 

He throws the soggy napkins away by the time he gets to the train station, feeling no more dry than he had before. It’s half past seven and there’s no way to make it to his history class in time, but, as he settles into a window seat and sips his coffee, he finds it hard to care. There’s very little waiting for him at school aside from another day of lectures and classes he’s passing but not interested in and it’s hard to force himself to care about a future that seems muddy and gray. He reaches a hand into the paper bag, pulls a piece of the unidentifiable pastry off, and pops it into his mouth. It’s buttery and sweet, rich in a way that is miles away from the granola bars he’s been eating all week out of the bottom of his backpack, and he sighs into his coffee. The coffee isn’t life changing, but it’s good - good in a way that melts the tension out of his shoulders, makes the rest of the day seem inconsequential and unimportant in the wake of this tiny reprieve. He chews his food, and sips his coffee, and feels a sudden and overwhelming sense of homesickness. It’s been a year since he’s seen his parents, since he tasted his mother’s homemade pasta and had her pinch his cheeks lovingly, and he feels the absence like something physical. Not for the first time since moving he wonders what he’s doing with his life and why he made the choice to come here at all. 

He glances at the piece of paper Quyhn had handed him with the job information printed across the front. He’s not really in need of a job, not while his course load is so heavy and he’s working part time in the school library, but he reads it with a consideration he probably shouldn’t all the same. It’s a help wanted listing for waitstaff at a brand new Southern American bistro opening four blocks down from the cafe he’d just been at with Quyhn. The city needs another restaurant like it needs a natural disaster and he should crumple up the flier and put it into his backpack to trash later, but his day is already so off-kilter and, to be fair, he had found Quyhn strangely endearing despite himself. So normally he might ignore the flier, but today he pulls out his phone and texts the number on the flier ("This is Nicky from this morning. It was lovely meeting you today. Are you still looking for people to interview?") and, in contrast to what he thinks will happen, he gets a message back right away with an interview time and a smiley face. 

When the time comes to interview, Nicky wears the nicest pair of pants he owns that are not made of denim and one of his many chambray button-ups over a plain green crew neck shirt to step over concrete dust and drywall sanders for his one-on-one interview. Quyhn asks him a few standard questions about his availability and his work experience, the latter of which he knows can’t be anywhere near what she’s looking for.

“Your resume says you've worked in a restaurant before, in… Genoa?” Quyhn asks, while scanning over Nicky’s resume, her eyes glazing over in a way that suggests she’s already interviewed too many people. “Genoa, Italy?”

“My parents own a small cafe,” Nicky replies, and doesn’t add that he had done little more than wash dishes for them over a few summers. He’s spent enough time refilling water glasses and keeping out of everyone’s way that he thinks he can probably manage to bring plates of food to a table without hurting himself or anyone else. This is the service industry, after all, not an interview with NASA. “I don’t have any formal experience, but I’m a fast learner.”

Quyhn is polite, and friendly, and she doesn’t check any of Nicky’s references. She calls him two days later to ask if he still wants the job and to ask when he can come by to pick up his monogrammed apron and to sign the remaining onboarding paperwork. So, for better or for worse, Nicky gets hired as a server at a place he probably has no business working. He’s fairly certain that Quyhn realizes at the time of their interview that this is a gamble, but she gives him a chance regardless; maybe she really is just that desperate after all. 

Nicky stumbles his way through the first few weeks of scheduled training without setting himself or anyone else on fire. By the time they open the doors he still hasn’t really gotten his bearings, or gotten any closer to opening a bottle of wine without smacking himself in the chin, but it doesn’t seem to make a bit of difference. Quyhn smiles at him and says, "You'll get it eventually. You're very sweet, Nicky, and you sell a lot of wine - whether you can open it or not."

She’s not wrong. Nicky breaks corks in wine necks like it’s his super power, and he drops glasses and plates full of food a foot out of the kitchen almost on cue, but his tables either don’t seem to notice or don’t seem to care. He makes more in gratuity than he has at any previous job in his life, despite not having a clue what he’s doing or whether or not the special of the day contains dairy or shellfish, and he’s a hundred percent okay with that. The money he makes at _The Old Guard_ more than pays his rent, and his accumulated student loans, and it should be more than enough to make him happy, but it’s not. The work is fine, but, despite being challenging in its own ways, it doesn’t light any sort of passion in him that he realizes he’s desperately still looking for. He doesn’t know what he’s trying to do, or what he wants to aspire to be, and the answer feels like it’s moving further and further out of his reach. 

Nicky sees himself as a soon-to-be college dropout with no real talent, with no real future, but he’s wrong. He’s only at _The Old Guard_ for two and a half months before everything changes for him again. The first catalyst was running into Quyhn on that rainy morning in October, and the second happens on the busiest Friday night they’ve had since opening the restaurant. Nicky doesn’t have very much restaurant experience other than what he’s learned in the two and a half months he’s been there, but it turns out that neither does the cook scheduled to run the cold station that night. They’re booked solid on reservations with an hour and a half wait for general seating when Nicky walks into the kitchen to find the cold station cook and their executive chef, Andy, in a yelling match in the middle of the kitchen over a salad. 

The argument leads to some pretty choice words being exchanged, followed by the throwing of lettuce, and ends with Nicky making his own salad in an attempt at salvaging his table’s first course. He manages to hazard together something that looks like a salad, while also listening to the symphony of Andy verbally destroying the man’s talents, and skills, and general likeability as a human being (one would also assume someone files the actual paperwork needed to fire someone, but Nicky isn't going to rule out public humiliation as being the restaurant's legal procedure for termination). Nicky’s second trip to the kitchen after that leads to him finding one of his fellow servers, Lykon, staring at the abandoned cold station in complete bafflement. He ends up making a salad for both of their tables, as well as two more for another server’s table, and it all snowballs from there. He doesn’t really know when the transition occurs, just that at the end of his shift Andy hands him an apron and an address on where to get a chef’s coat embroidered on short notice, with a reminder that he needs to show up at the crack of dawn to begin prep work. 

The absence of tips is hard to swallow at first; it had been nice having cash in his wallet at the end of each night. The work, however, is far easier than dealing with picky clientele who need everything to be just so and who seems to fluctuate in outrageousness and rudeness based on the phases of the moon. If Nicky is honest with himself then it’s also work that he’s pretty decent at and work that - surprise, surprise - he actually enjoys. Working in the kitchen is not like serving though and he learns everything by the seat of his pants, with a push and a shove from the other back of house crew. It slowly gets to a point where the fumbling blindly along turns into something like actual experience and skill. The kitchen works like a well oiled machine, like Chef Andy’s’ own personal army, and it means feeling a little like something larger than yourself. 

Nicky is not the newest addition to the kitchen staff. That mantle has been passed down to Andy’s protege, Nile, who has four years of culinary school under her belt when she shows up, but who hasn’t ever so much as prepped for a single dinner service. Nile is young and fresh faced, wide eyed and stubbornly dedicated to learning, and Nicky wants the best for her the moment she steps foot in their kitchen. The camaraderie he’s shown in the beginning from the staff means that, when Nile comes into the picture, Nicky is quick to ensure she feels right at home in their little found family. So sometimes Nicky will sneak slightly used technique books into her backpack, or gift cards with odd amounts left on them to _Sur La Table_ , or notes (or text messages, because Nile is always glued to her phone) about when they change the soups and on what days their specials change. He wants her to have, more than anything, the sense that she is not alone. 

Andy helps all of them more than she would ever admit to, but she’s also something of a tyrant who can easily give off an air of being inconvenienced by everyone and everything around her purely by existing. Andy manages the entire back of house staff, while simultaneously trying to teach Nile everything she knows in a bullheaded attempt at molding her into the perfect sous chef, and she does this while juggling their ever changing seasonal menu and the whims of her wife, Quyhn. Even if she felt the desire to teach Nile, or even Nicky, what everyone else has spent years learning she just doesn’t have the time left in the day. Which means that Booker picks up the slack and shows Nile how to sharpen knives, and Nicky accidentally forgets his own prep work and helps her chop what feels like but probably isn’t a thousand pounds of locally sourced vegetables. Sometimes it means that Quyhn herself will burst into the kitchen with some terrible problem that Andy absolutely must see at that very moment, which somehow always coincides when Nile is running behind and Andy is breathing down her neck impatiently. All kitchens are a dysfunctional family, but Nicky is obnoxiously fond of his own and he wants nothing more than to make sure their newest addition feels like one of them.

Everything that happens is really just leading up to the third catalyst in Nicky’s life. Which is that, three months after starting at _The Old Guard_ , Nile invites one of her close friends to apply as a server, upon Quyhn's urging, and promptly ruins Nicky's entire life. 

The short and sweet of it is that Nicky realizes that he is going to die alone. Which isn’t to say that he’s going to die soon or anything - this is an internal crisis, not a doctor’s diagnosis. He realizes he will die alone because there is some exasperatingly defective part of his brain, either overworked or in desperate need of repair, that sees an insurmountable obstacle in its way and thinks, ' _Why go around when we could go through?'_ Which could mean great things if he were an entrepreneur, or if he were the type of person to really buckle down and focus in school, but he's not. The insurmountable obstacle he's decided to tackle is that of grossly misplaced affection, wherein the word ‘misplaced’ is in bold and underlined three times. It starts out small enough that he doesn't notice it slinking underneath his mental radar, until it's already been set loose on an unsuspecting world.

Nicky doesn't have a type. He's dated girls of varying heights, political beliefs, and hair colors. His first girlfriend was a redhead who stole his colored pens from his desk and both kissed and punched him on the same day. The first girl he'd dated upon immigrating to the United States had been an immigrant herself from Norway and had introduced him to some of his favorite local restaurants. Even as recently as last year Nicky had been on a date with two women on complete opposite sides of the social and political spectrum who had been nice in their own rights, but it hadn't panned out because it never panned out.

_“Why doesn't it pan out?”_ his mother might ask if she had the chance (and, also, _“When will you give me grandchildren, Nicolo, why don't you love your poor mother?”_ ). Nicky knows his friends think he doesn't put in any real effort into dating, but Nicky puts in literally all the effort he can stomach. Dating has never been a priority for him and even the few serious relationships he's been in have ended in under a year's time.

Nile's friend Yusuf ( _"Please, call me Joe."_ ) gets hired on as a server and Nicky promptly loses his God damned mind. They meet on Joe's first day, shaking hands politely in the kitchen, and then Nicky turns and upends an entire hotel pan of roasted tomatoes onto the floor by accident. When Joe stands at the far countertop and folds napkins into perfect rectangles, Nicky watches each elegant movement of Joe’s hands instead of his own, and subsequently burns himself on the cooktop. When Joe comes into the back to carry buckets of ice from the ice machine to the drink stations up front, Nicky gets distracted by watching him bend to scoop ice and the chicken he’s been broiling turns black. 

Nicky has never once entertained the notion of being attracted to men, but maybe Joe is the exception to the rule because he is absurdly handsome and he’s all Nicky can think about when he thinks of dating. Joe with his dark curls and his well kept beard and his bright, brown eyes have taken over Nicky’s life and he doesn’t know how to convince himself that it is just a passing fancy. Surely at twenty one years old he knows who and what he is attracted to. Surely, at twenty one years old, he’s not having a sexual identity crisis in a foreign country in the middle of trying to figure out what he wants to do with his professional life. Joe is a menace, both to Nicky’s mental and emotional well being, and all of this is Nile’s fault for bringing him into Nicky’s life in the first place. 

Joe is kind, and exceptionally charming, and disastrously funny, and Nicky falls for him between one dinner service and the next. He occupies himself by swiping through the Tinder account Quyhn had helped him set up what feels like an age ago, and he goes on a few dates with some of her and Andy’s mutual friends who they assure him are into men even if he has his doubts, and he tries everything he can to push this fleeting fancy to the back of his mind. Except that his heart and his mind have been conspiring against him from the first time Joe stepped foot in the restaurant and after four months of working together, and four months of becoming close friends, Nicky is no nearer his destination of moving on from this mind numbingly annoying crush than he was in the beginning. 

For what it's worth, Nicky doesn't end up dying alone, but this story doesn’t start there either.


	2. Chapter 1

Nicky Smith knows he’s lost control of his life when, at four o’clock in the morning on a Thursday, his cell phone starts ringing and he doesn’t immediately fling it across the room like he used to do with his alarm clocks his last year of secondary school. He doesn’t have anywhere to be or any obligations to fulfill for another full five hours, and the idea of watching his phone explode against the far wall is obscenely appealing, but knowing his luck it would probably continue ringing even in a hundred pieces scattered across the floor. The world outside of his mass of blankets is cold, and unwelcoming, and he tries to reach a hand out to blindly grab for the phone without leaving the safety of his blanket cocoon. The charging cord he forgot about decides to join the party, sweeping across the nightstand with gusto and knocking almost all of the contents onto the concrete floor with wild abandon. 

“ _Pronto,_ ” he murmurs, more into the pillow than the phone. It also says a lot about his life in general that he knows who is calling even without looking at the display, at four o’clock in the morning. Then again, his boss is exactly the kind of person who doesn’t understand that some people require sleep and can’t exist entirely on caffeine and pure stubborn will, so maybe he’s not as clairvoyant as he feels. 

“We’re changing the menu,” Andy says, sounding far, far too awake for there to not be any sunlight out yet. It almost sounds, from the way her voice is echoing slightly through the speaker, that she’s already at the restaurant - or, more realistically, that she never left from the night before. She also sounds, as is the norm, like she feels no remorse for the bomb of bad news she’s about to drop. “I need you here at 5.”

“You’re aware I can’t teleport, right?” Nicky asks, speaking half into his pillow still and half into where the screen is pressed uncomfortably against his face. There’s no reply to his inquiry other than the soft ‘click’ of Andy hanging up the kitchen phone on him, which is an answer all on its own. Nicky stares into the darkness of his pillows and sheets for a moment longer, crushing his face further into the warmth and trying to convince himself that spending the rest of his week job searching would be way worse than a few lost hours of sleep. Outside of his window there’s the sound of a car or two passing by on the wet road, but nothing else; it is dark, and very sleepy, and he’s done nothing to deserve this. 

He rolls over and kicks at the blankets, until they’re moved enough to uncover his face and chest, and the cool air very quickly makes itself an immediate and intimate bed partner. There’s a text on his phone from his coworker, Booker, that is just a bunch of random button mashes (‘ _IA@@#2kj_ ’) and Nicky sends back a sad face emoji in solidarity. There’s also a text from Nile that is from three hours ago and is asking about whether or not they’re commuting into work again together at nine; Nile calls him while he’s still in the middle of replying and he almost accidentally ignores the call. 

“I’ll be at your place in fifteen,” Nile says, already out of breath. There’s an unhappy ‘meow’ in the background, probably from one of her eleven cats that all hate Nicky for no reason. “Andy called you, right?”

“If I say ‘no’ do I get to feign ignorance and go back to sleep?” he asks, voice dry and only a little groggy. “I’ll meet you out front.”

He hangs up and stares for a long two minutes at the ceiling, before slowly, slowly, slowly rolling himself out of bed. The concrete floor of his apartment is obscenely cold and he can’t remember where he put his socks or house shoes; he ends up doing a combination of hopping and running to get to the bathroom. Once there he knocks over his own clothes hamper and almost slips on the fuzzy bathmat, but he’s doing pretty well considering he’s half asleep and attempting to navigate entirely by squinting. There is a pitiful amount of hot water for the first thirty seconds of his shower, which then turns to lukewarm for a solid two minutes thereafter. Nicky hates his apartment, and this city, and Andrea Mache, and everything and everyone. 

It takes ten frantic minutes to shower, brush his teeth, and find clean clothes. He struggles to get his coat over his white chef’s jacket and manages to grab all of his things (and definitely does not almost forget his keys and metro pass) and get out of the door five minutes early. The cold almost-morning air dives through all of the nooks and crannies of his coat without wasting any time at all. He tries not to think about how he could still be in bed, or even just eating a bowl of cereal, or searching Craigslist for a normal job with normal hours and normal coworkers. He shoves his already cold hands in his pockets and walks as briskly as he can down the sidewalk.

Nile is in her usual spot, three blocks away, waiting. She’s wrapped in a purple peacoat and matching scarf, gloved hands hastily texting away on her phone, and she looks absolutely miserable. There’s a fairly good chance, seeing as how her original text was from somewhere around one in the morning, that she had been out late after work the night before and hadn’t anticipated being called in early. She looks as though she is also reconsidering many of her life choices; she also looks a little hungover, but Nicky isn’t here to judge.

“It’s freezing,” Nile moans when she sees him and latches onto his arm while they walk to the train station. Her attempt at leeching body heat is laughably pointless, because Nicky barely generates enough body heat for his own uses and is definitely not the kind of person you go to for warmth, but he doesn’t shake her off. The idea of walking together is safety in numbers, but Nicky thinks that two underpaid food service workers are not necessarily a prime target for early morning mugging regardless. Even if they were, he’s seen Nile take down men twice her size with one hand, so honestly the fact that she’s walking with him is simply a diversionary tactic; in the scheme of things maybe _she’s_ the bodyguard. 

When they get to the 5th street underground stop there’s a man sleeping next to an ad for electrolyte enhanced water, and one or two people milling about in scrubs, but otherwise the space is very empty. The clock on the wall says they’re five minutes early for a train that is habitually ten minutes late. 

“So, I spent three hours at Shifty Eyes last night,” Nile begins, attempting to dig her phone out of her pocket with the arm that’s still linked around Nicky’s, “listening to Dizzy complain about her love life, so I’m willing to bet you’ve got that waiting for you.”

“Dizzy’s problems are always just ‘ _this girl I’m staring at creepily and not speaking to doesn’t seem to realize I want to date her’_.”

“Yeah, I know, and I’ve had enough of that for a lifetime, so you need to step your game up. Maybe if you came out with us instead of going to sleep at seven thirty like an eighty year old grandma I wouldn’t be playing therapist.”

Nicky exhales loudly. “Calls at four a.m. for me to come descale fish are exactly the reason I don’t go out with you.”

The train arrives on time, just to spite him, and then it’s twenty minutes of stops-and-gos to get to the closest station to _The Old Guard_ . They move out onto the platform and Nicky manages to not forget his backpack on the train today. There’s an ‘out-of-order’ sign over the escalator that’s been there since he moved to the city and Nile beats him up the four sets of stairs like normal. There's a cafe – _Felicia’s_ \- a block from the station that they stop into every single morning they commute together. It's the same cafe Quyhn unknowingly introduced him to a year ago, with the most amazing pastries and baked goods Nicky has ever put in his mouth, and with coffee so delicious that it makes his toes curl. Alana waves when Nile and him make their way in through the door, where they are also greeted by the smell of yeast and butter and coffee beans. The tiny building is empty and warm and Nicky wants to curl up on their floor and sleep forever.

They go in often enough that it's clockwork by now: she puts their pastries in a to-go bag and her husband, who has never spoken a word to them and stares at everyone as though they are wielding baseball bats underneath their coats, fixes two paper cups of coffee. Sometimes – like today – Nicky orders an extra coffee, and the gesture inevitably earns him a look of betrayed disgust from Nile. 

“Seriously? You're getting that tyrant coffee?” she asks, lip curling. “Nicky, she is the enemy right now.”

“Keep your friends close and your enemies closer,” Nicky replies, with a shrug, even though they both know he’s full of shit. 

It's another four blocks to the restaurant. The kitchen is mostly empty, although there's a light on in Chef Andy’s office and Quyhn has a truly worrying amount of paperwork spread out on the empty line table. The door to the walk-in is open, with empty boxes lining the walkway, and Nicky steps over them and dodges an empty cheese box that flies past his head.

Andy looks up from where she's cleaning and organizing – because they're expecting a delivery in an hour and she has some sort of intricate organization system in place that is really just better left for her to fiddle with – and doesn't so much as blink. “Put your stuff away. I’ve got an entire list of things I need from you.”

“Good morning, boss,” Nick says without pause, as though Andy is an adult in an episode of Charlie Brown and all she says is so much wobbly noise. He extends one of the coffee cups and one of the pastry bags, which contains homemade baklava that he knows is Andy’s one true weakness despite all her posturing. “It’s so nice of you to politely ask us to come in early. We are so very glad to help out.”

Andy gives him a pointed look, but her eyes and her expression both soften when she sees the offering in his hand. Her face goes through at least four different versions of contemplative, which Nicky has learned to decipher over the year he’s been here, and then she exhales loudly. 

“What would I do without you, Nicky?” she asks, taking the coffee and the paper bag with a tired smile. She takes a sip of the coffee and her eyes roll into the back of her head as though it’s the best thing she’s ever tasted. “I don’t deserve you.”

“Go easy on Booker today,” Nicky says, patting her on the shoulder and moving past her to get started on his prep work. “I get the feeling he was out late.”

Andy snorts, but doesn’t reply. She takes her items over to the U-shaped island of prep tables where her clipboard is waiting. Her expression is back to something unpleasant as she stares at her list, but Nicky recognizes the tension gone in the set of her shoulders and he grins across the kitchen at where Nile is watching with a nonplussed look. She pretends to shoot herself in the head with finger guns, but Nicky knows a look of defeat when he sees one.

-/-

By ten thirty Nicky has made an impressive dent into the joint prep list and has lined the walk-in with hotel pans of diced vegetables and fileted salmon. There is some busy work on the prep list that he’s been skirting around ever since he saw it, but there’s only so long he can put off carving mushrooms into edible garnishes before Andy comes looking for him with that twitch in her eye. Nicky is not above admitting that their plating lately has been a little lackluster and that a few garnishes might go a long way in transforming some of their simpler dishes, but he’s also got enough to do that he doesn’t need any additional busy work. Carving mushrooms seems like something they could put Dizzy in charge of rather than letting her spend an inordinate amount of time washing and peeling potatoes they don’t even need until tomorrow. This is what happens when you let people prep from the same list rather than assigning them specific tasks.

By eleven forty five Andy pulls a couple of margherita flatbreads out of the oven and presents them to everyone just in time for lunch. They’re still burn-the-roof-of-your-mouth-hot but Nicky still eats one piece too many and then spends the remainder of his two hour lunch napping in one of the empty booths in the dining room. His alarm goes off on his phone around two and he drags himself back into the kitchen to finish the list in time for dinner service.

“Your husband is here,” Nile says, as she carries a stack of saucepans taller than herself back to dish, and Nicky doesn’t even look up from where he’s butchering a chicken. A couple of months ago those comments might’ve made him jumpy, but he’s gotten to know Nile a lot better in those few months and he knows she doesn’t have a mean spirited bone in her body. Nile only says it jokingly and never where anyone of consequence could overhear and it’s more endearing now than anything else. 

Nicky doesn’t look up from his work until a smoothie in the most disgusting shade of baby puke green gets set down on his workbench right next to his filets. Then he does look up in order to fix Joe with the most uneasy look he can manage. 

“You’re going to like this one,” Joe promises him, sipping on his own garishly colored smoothie. He’s in a muscle tee that is clinging unfairly to his biceps, his gym bag that holds his work clothes slung over one shoulder. The post-workout smoothie he’s brought for Nicky is sitting, unmoving on the workbench looking as intimidating as a blended beverage is capable. 

Nicky washes his chicken covered hands in the sink and then picks up the smoothie hesitantly. 

“You always say that,” he says and doesn’t take a sip. “You come in and you go, ‘Oh, Nicky, it’s grass clippings and apricot you’ll love it.’ And then I drink it, like an idiot, and am filled with incredible regret.”

“It’s apple, kale, ginger, and beetroot,” Joe says, like any of those things belong together let alone combined in the same drink. “It’s good for you.”

Nicky gives him another desperate look, but Joe’s earnest smile doesn’t waver. He takes a tentative sip of the smoothie and is immediately reminded of cleaning out the compost pile at his parent’s house on a hot August morning. It’s followed up by a sweet burst of apple, which makes it palatable enough to swallow, and Nicky manages all of it without so much as a grimace; he’s had some experience at this point. 

“It’s vile,” Nicky confirms for him, lips pulling into a smile at the exaggerated eye roll it earns him. He takes another sip because he is a masochist and always finishes these horrendous smoothies no matter how many terrible ones Joe brings him. “You torture yourself for an hour in the gym and your reward is kale. That’s miserable, Joe.”

“Why do you think I always bring you down with me?” Joe asks, good natured, and winks cheekily at Nicky. He and his own awful smoothie leave towards the dining room, presumably to go change in the men’s room, and Nicky watches him leave because he’s a weak, weak man. 

Despite having only entered his life a little more than six months ago, and despite sharing almost no common interests initially, Joe is easily the most important person to come into Nicky’s life in the last twenty one years of existence. Joe is his quintessential better half, the piece of his soul that was unfortunately misplaced at his birth and then relocated at a later time. Joe is unerringly kind, and infinitely patient, and as passionate about his friends as anyone Nicky has ever seen. Joe is the kind of friend Nicky feels both unbearably fortunate and disproportionately undeserving to have. He and Nicky have been nearly inseparable since meeting - whether that means being the first to arrive at Joe’s art exhibit, or Joe coming over his place to watch what is sure to be another horrendously produced documentary on the Crusades, or Nicky showing up to Joe’s place with a new recipe and a handful of ingredients he’s never touched. They’re in each others’ orbit and it’s been so comfortable and easy that it only makes sense that Nicky would complicate the whole thing by falling in love with Joe ass over teakettle.

The initial problem, the one that assaults you before you’ve even had a chance to speak to him, is that Joe is just unfairly attractive, even in the same black button-up and black pants as the rest of the waitstaff. He would still catch Nicky’s eye in his pajamas - in a _potato sack_ \- and it is this realization, that he finds another man attractive in a way that is far beyond and above casual observation, that starts Nicky on his downward spiral. He doesn’t have a whole lot of experience to draw on in this department. All of his previous romantic interests have been women, typically met through friends or through school, and he’s never before had any interest in 1) men, or 2) a coworker. It would be easy to chalk it up as a passing fancy, or as simple curiosity, but the problem is that it’s not entirely about finding Joe attractive. No, that might make things simpler.

Not that Nicky hasn't vividly daydreamed about Joe showing up naked and laying across the prep table, but there's this annoying niggling thing in the back of his head that says he also wants to meet Joe’s family in Tunisia, and go with him to all of his favorite restaurants, and see where he studied for a year in France – and it all seriously starts to go downhill from there. Nicky is not a twelve year old girl, but sometimes he looks at Joe and gets the urge to scribble their names together on his prep list and plan the menu for their wedding, so maybe Nicky is twelve years old after all. 

So Nicky does absolutely nothing aside from maintaining the status quo. He shows up to work, and he banters with Joe, and he thinks about what could be if he were someone else entirely, and he does nothing. Because he doesn’t know where he wants to take this, if he even wants to take it anywhere at all, and the idea of disrupting this beautiful thing they already have makes him feel sick to his stomach. If he does nothing then everything stays the same; Joe still smiles at him over episodes of _Chopped_ while they work together harmoniously and no one has to know that Nicky is having an internal crisis that is threatening to ruin his entire social life if it goes tits up. Nicky is paralyzed by the possibility of failure, when failure could mean losing Joe as a close friend entirely and creating a rift in the comfortable work environment he’s become unbearably fond of. 

Joe is bisexual and Nicky knows this because Nile makes a point of going out of her way to remind Nicky of this on the regular, almost like clockwork, but Joe’s sexuality is not the problem. No, the problem is _Nicky’s_ sexuality, or, rather, the fact that he’s still confused about what it is and what it isn’t and what it should be. Nicky has thought men attractive before in passing, in the same way he appreciates art that he doesn’t understand, but he’s never been sexually attracted to a man before and it’s a little terrifying. The idea of testing out his sexuality with Joe is terrifying. Nicky knows he is very likely to crash and burn at least a few times in his quest to discover himself, but the very last thing he wants to do is have one of those horrendous trainwrecks be at Joe’s expense. 

_‘It doesn’t even matter. Joe liking men doesn’t mean he likes you_ ,’ Nicky reminds himself, always his worst critic.

The rest of the kitchen staff around him are busy preparing for dinner and Nicky has no other excuses to keep him from getting started on carving out the garnishes he’s been putting off all day. He’s elbows deep in carving radishes to look like mushrooms, as fast as he possibly can without also making mushrooms of his thumbs, when Booker comes over to his station with an open bottle of wine. 

“Taste this,” he says, sitting the bottle onto Nicky’s workstation as though it is a glass of water and not an invitation to start drinking on the clock. 

“Has it been that kind of day already?” Nicky asks, his paring knife working away at the unfortunate radish in his hand. “I usually like to wait until I’ve had to remake the same ticket three times before I get into the alcohol.”

“It’s always one of those days,” Booker confirms, but nudges the bottle towards Nicky again. “No, seriously. It tastes off.”

Nicky sets aside his knife and brushes his hands off on his apron before picking up the bottle. He gives it a sniff, because he’s not about to just drink from the bottle, and recoils immediately. 

“It’s vinegar,” Nicky says, left eye twitching almost involuntarily. “Don’t use that.”

“How have we had a bottle of Pinot Grigio long enough for it to turn into vinegar? We’re getting cases in every week,” Booker takes the wine bottle back and, impossibly, without flinching, takes a drink right from the bottle. Nicky watches him in horror, but makes no move to stop him. “Ugh. That’s horrible.”

“Why would you _drink_ it?” 

“Maybe it smelled worse than it tasted, you never know.”

“You need professional help, Sebastian,” Nicky picks his knife back up and gets back to his garnishes. “Why are you doing shots of vinegar instead of helping me waste my time doing this?”

Booker raises an eyebrow and recorks the wine bottle, which means it’s probably going to end up back on a shelf somewhere instead of in the trash where it belongs. “You’re doing an admirable job, Nicky. I wouldn’t want to get in the way. Why are you making an army of radish mushrooms? Are we doing some sort of Super Mario themed salad I didn't know about?”

“They're for the prix fixe tonight, and, no, I don't know why,” Nicky tosses another perfectly carved radish into the pile. “Probably because Andy is testing me and my will to live.”

Booker, wisely, leaves him to his garnishes and takes his vinegar elsewhere.

-/-

Dinner service comes together like always, through pure stubborn will and some truly inspiring improvisation. The new prix fixe menu takes a lot of work because it’s got a lot of extra flair added to it to make it seem special, but it brings in a lot of customers who normally might be turned away by their admittedly pretentious menu. Every idea Andy comes up with is golden and Nicky knows he and the rest of the staff would never put out food they weren’t proud of, but sometimes their clientele is just absurdly picky enough to have to make exceptions. 

“No dressing, no cheese, no nuts, side avocado,” Nicky reads, staring at the ticket in hand. He wants to chuck it out the window, or set it on fire, or set it on fire and then chuck it out the window. “So lettuce? A salad with just lettuce. You can get a pound of lettuce at the store for like a dollar. Why even order this?”

“So they can pay my way through medical school,” Lykon offers, with a shrug. He slides the plate of lettuce onto his serving tray and gives Nicky a smile. “Trust me, I don’t get it either.”

He waves him off, because there are at least twenty other tickets he can be griping about right now. Almost every single prix fixe salad that has come back tonight has had alterations made to it and Nicky is at the point where he’s beginning to second guess his own memory of how to make the damned salad in the first place. 

“I’m at twenty two minutes on those salmon!” Andy calls across the kitchen, neatly arranging tickets on her line like they're from the lottery and not from the dusty little printer that is very nearly on the verge of kicking the bucket. 

“Salmon? I’m supposed to have a salmon?!” Nile shrieks from the grill. 

The restaurant is doing well, but it's rarely fully booked unless it's a Friday or Saturday night – which tonight is not. They get a lot of the theater going crowd, tourists and the middle class who are seeing whatever is in production at the Erhalt Theater a block down. The standard menu is expensive fare – locally sourced and seasonal, with “seasonal” sometimes coming to mean “changes every other night” - and it's the theater going crowd who orders from it nine times out of ten. They're either well off and not put out by spending a couple hundred on dinner for two, or they're on vacation and see it as an indulgent splurge. The prix fixe menu is what brings in the natives, the locals that either live in the nearby high rises or who heard about it through word of mouth, and who are not as willing to put down so much cash outside of anniversary and birthday dinners.

The prix fixe menu is Andy's idea, but it's almost sort of become Nile’s pet project and she's seen it through change, after change, after change. Andy still has to approve everything on it, and then she changes it some more – usually to test out something she's had rolling around in her mind but isn't prepared to shell out for to put on the main menu every night. It also gives Nile a little independence, because, although Andy often dictates what should be on it, she isn't really interested in how it comes to be on the plate - and therefore Nile generally takes this as free reign for artistic interpretation. It gets interesting because sometimes Nicky feels like Andy is testing Nile and that Nile is trying to provoke Andy. Because Andy will put something like 'meatloaf' as the entree, and Nile will compose a six piece deconstruction of 'meatloaf' featuring things like 'tomato balsamic reduction' and 'sirloin compote', which feels to Nicky a lot like poking a bear with a stick. That said, it's not like Nile creates things that are anything but delicious, so Andy never really says anything about the variances. She does sometimes get this knowing look, like she might be a little proud her successor is deliberately being as much of a spiteful asshole as possible. 

Andy starts the menu, Nile creates it, and Quyhn finishes it. She has an eye for business, and she knows what people want to eat. She creates advertising and menus with captivating descriptions and fonts, and she entices reservations who seem uncertain about showing up with tantalizing tales of succulent ingredients woven into magic. This restaurant is almost entirely staffed by mad geniuses. Sometimes Nicky wonders why they even bothered hiring extra staff.

“Nicky, table 15 has a dairy allergy!” Celeste calls, on her way to drop off a tray full of plates into dish. 

Nicky’s eye twitches, but he pulls the ticket from his rail all the same and makes a note on it in sharpie. 

_The Old Guard_ is only open four days a week, and only for dinner, and their staff numbers definitely reflect that. Nicky is on a would-probably-go-over-to-your-house-for-drinks basis with essentially everyone that works there, and he pretty much works with almost everyone every day. He gets there at the crack of dawn to do the prep work, takes a two or three hour lunch, gets back to the kitchen in time to prepare for and combat dinner, and then he heads home. The process consumes his entire day, leaving him exhausted and not really willing to do anything at the day's end other than fall into bed and prepare for the next crazy shift. The payoff, of course, is that he spends four days wrecking his sleep schedule and working twelve hour shifts, and then he has three glorious days off that he spends actually enjoying life.

There are jobs with better schedules, and there are jobs with better pay and less stress, but, despite its faults, Nicky loves his job in a way he never has before. Some days he thinks about how it might be nicer to live a station or two closer, or how it would be nice to know ahead of time if he’s going to be called in on his days off to chop celery, but overall he’s genuinely happy. He’s made friends with the people he works with, the people who support him even when he’s making a serious mess of their efforts, and he’s found something he never knew he was good at that he actually enjoys. It’s not a bachelor’s degree, and it’s not a six figure salary, but, for the moment, it’s enough. 

Some nights are longer than others. Some nights he helps the servers break down the dining room, or helps Andy take inventory, or gathers up linens for the laundry pick up. Some nights - like tonight - the clock over the hostess stand tells him it's half past midnight and he still hasn’t even left the restaurant. These nights happen more often the further into the restaurant’s mechanics he gets pulled; the more time Andy invests in him, the more time Nicky invests in the restaurant as a whole. 

It’s on these nights, when he stays late to help everyone else close up, that Joe eventually turns to him, while they’re both standing on the sidewalk in the sparse light, and says, “I’ll drive you home, Nico.”

He stopped phrasing it as a question a long time ago. He’s learned by now that presenting the offer as a question will inevitably lead to Nicky waving him off, thanking him, and waiting in the train station for forty-five minutes for his train. Joe knows at this point how far away Nicky lives, and how many stops it is, and apparently there’s enough about that combination that doesn’t sit well with him at half past midnight. 

Joe has driven him home more times than either of them can probably count since he started working at the restaurant, and yet he hasn’t asked for directions since the first time. He has the route memorized, even without using the GPS built into the console of his car, and Nicky doesn’t read too much into that. Actually, he reads too much into everything Joe says and does, but that’s just because he’s a glutton for punishment.

The ride is always super quiet, with the satellite radio turned up just enough for it to be background music. So Nicky listens to whatever indie station Joe has it turned to, and listens to the echo of the turn signal, and he listens to the slide of Joe’s hands against the steering wheel, and tries to pretend he feels comfortable. Even as many times as they’ve done this Nicky still feels out of place in Joe’s car - it smells like him and he keeps it freakishly clean, without even so much as an apron thrown in the backseat. Despite being invited, Nicky feels like an intruder. 

These rides home always go the same, but tonight Joe breathes in deeply, one hand on the wheel and the other resting in his lap, and says, “This city is gorgeous, and you make good money, so why do you live in the shittiest part?”

Nicky feels the corners of his lips quirking up into a smile. “Getting tired of driving me home?”

“Yes, the fifteen minutes it takes to get you home is a real hardship. Do you know what I could do with all that extra free time?”

“You could find a better radio station,” Nicky offers, and his smile widens as Joe gapes at him dramatically. 

“These insults,” Joe says, pressing a hand to his chest as though hurt. “Next you’ll be telling me you don’t love _Worst Cooks in America_ and you’ve just been watching reruns to placate me.”

“It’s the least I can do after you stomached that disaster of a quiche I made last week.”

Joe laughs, surprised. “To be honest with you I had blocked that from my memory.”

There's no traffic so late at night, and even though they hit nearly every light on the way there it still takes just under fifteen minutes. They pull up in front of the brick building in one of the two loading zones. There's someone sleeping in the alley near the building and there's a light on the third floor that's flashing as though it's coming from a television, but otherwise the street and building are quiet. Joe still glances out the window disapprovingly, as though this is obviously some sort of crack house he shouldn't be leaving his friend at.

Nicky grabs his backpack, heavy from where Celeste had insisted he take three quarters of the dinner she'd ordered that evening and not finished, and pulls it onto his knees. He has one hand on the door handle, and for a really weird moment he considers asking Joe if he wants to come up for a cup of coffee or something – which is stupid, stupid, stupid and weird. 

There are four million reasons why it's a bad idea, which is probably why he swallows the question and instead says, “Thanks again. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Melissa is moving out in December,” Joe says, apropos of nothing. “Her and her fiance are moving in together somewhere downtown, you know how it goes.”

“Oh,” Nicky says, hand still on the door handle, but caught suspended in motion. “That’s good for her. It’s good of her to give you such advanced notice.”

“She’s a good kid,” Joe agrees, then waves his hand dismissively, “but I have to find another roommate regardless, and it’s going to be difficult to replace someone like Melissa, she’s just so considerate and accommodating-”

Which is true. Nicky has only met her a handful of times but she seems lovely. It is a shame he probably won’t run into her any longer. 

“So I bring it up because, if you’re not too attached to living in skid row for the rest of your life, you might consider taking her spot,” Joe finishes, and Nicky’s brain stops working. 

He removes his hand from the door and leans back in his seat, still facing Joe. 

“Take her spot,” he repeats. “Like be your roommate?”

“It’s a five minute walk from the restaurant and you wouldn’t have to walk very far at all in order to make me try whatever concoction you’ve come up with at a quarter past two in the morning.”

“You have no idea what kind of roommate I would be,” Nicky reasons, hand tightening around the strap of his backpack still in his lap. “What if we fought? What if I leave dishes in the sink until they mold?”

Joe shrugs, like it’s not even worth considering. “Then we talk about it like grown adults and come to a solution? Have you never had a roommate before?”

“Not since my little brother and I shared bunk beds.”

“Then think on it. You don’t have to make a decision now. She’s not moving out until December, so I’ve got some time to find someone,” Joe says, and gives him a warm smile like he hasn’t completely shaken Nicky’s entire world. “Just something to consider. I won’t be offended if you say no.”

He shouldn’t say no. His apartment is terrible and the heat is still broken and he’s pretty sure his neighbors make meth in their bathtub, but he can’t bring himself to say yes either. Living with Joe feels like more than crossing over that line he’s been toeing. Agreeing to live with Joe feels like accepting a whole lot of things that Nicky has been very carefully categorizing and placing into the back of his mind to specifically not think about. 

“I will consider it,” Nicky says, and it only sort of feels like a lie.


	3. Chapter 2

It’s the last week of October, and a Sunday, and it’s been raining again. Nicky treks down the street in rain boots and his waterproof jacket, even if the hood isn’t quite as big as it should be and the buttons are a little loose from wear. Nile meets him at the station instead of on the sidewalk, because she lost her umbrella a week ago and now bolts down the street in between bursts of rain in an attempt to get to her destination without breaking down and buying another. 

“Trust me - I’ve tried,” she scoffs, pulling her hands out of her wet gloves when they find two seats together on the train. “I stand in that stupid aisle for twenty minutes, looking like a dumbass, staring at a bunch of umbrellas and buying nothing. It shouldn’t be this complicated.”

“Just buy an umbrella shaped device that blocks water from hitting you and contracts to save space when not needed,” Nicky reasons. “It’s not exactly the seven tasks of Hercules.”

Nile and Nicky are commuting buddies through reasoning of logistics more than anything. He lives down the street from her, they take the same train downtown, and their shifts coincide reasonably close enough for it to be beneficial for both parties. The train ride can be long, or weird, and the buddy system enables them to travel in the wee hours of the morning or late at night without really having to worry about who else might be traveling at the same time. Their commuting relationship began a week after Nile got hired, after they kept running into each other at the station, and what started out as a mutually beneficial arrangement has evolved into a close and comfortable friendship.

Nile is a good friend. She's headstrong, and fiercely loyal, and she's the kind of person who is innately good without having to try for it. Friends outside of work are difficult to come by when you work crazy twelve hour shifts four days a week. That means the rest of the time Nicky is intimately dating his pillow and television, or maybe making longing eyes with the shopping carts at the grocery store down the street, or quite possibly having meaningful afternoon coffee with the washer and dryer in the basement of his apartment building. What it really comes down to is that he doesn't really have time for much on his days off beyond catching up with his grease covered laundry and restocking his fridge with water and sandwich fixings.

″You obviously know nothing about umbrellas,″ Nile replies, because apparently they're not done having this conversation. ″You don't even own one.″

″Well that makes two of us,″ Nicky reasons, and shrugs. ″I don't melt on contact with water.″

It's still drizzling by the time they reach their destination and Nicky doesn't even try to keep up as Nile sprints down the street like the hounds of hell are at her heels. They make it there on time, even a little early – but also just in time to see Booker come careening out of the kitchen in a mild panic. 

″Health department!″ he hisses, a little too loudly to be as stealthy as he's probably trying for. ″I think Quyhn is about to have an aneurysm. She's stalling him, but Andy brought in a car load of shit today for the walk-in and I'm sure it's not labeled. I've been looking everywhere for you.″

″Why didn't you spend that time labeling it?″ Nile asks, and although Booker does look panic-stricken he's absolutely not missing any fingers or hands that could have been used to write dates. 

She gets a blank stare back, as though she's suggested he perform brain surgery in the middle of the kitchen. This is probably why, of all of them, Nile is the most obvious choice to be Andy’s next in command. 

“I’m on it,” Nicky assures her, and leaves them both in the hallway. 

He sneaks past where Quyhn is pretending to be confused about forms and proper documentation in order to get to the walk-in that's larger than the bathroom in his apartment. There is a stack of boxes in the middle of the floor, unmarked and unsealed, that look as though someone had planned to put them away and then had gotten distracted by something else and wandered off; this is actually Copley's organization process most of the time (although it is at least inside the walk-in this time, so there's something to be said about that). There are a half a dozen things out of place, or left open, which is a clear sign that both Copley and Booker have done their prep-work before anyone else clocked in. 

The boxes are the most egregious offense though and Nicky tackles them first. The first box is filled to the brim with citrus – lemon, limes, grapefruits – and it's a little odd, because they've already got plenty of fruit for the week, so why would Andy go and buy out the Farmer's Market of citrus, but okay whatever. At the very least they don't need to be individually labeled and are easy enough to dump into their respective bins. It's a mindlessly easy task, but of course no one else has done it this far – not that Nicky is secretly plotting the demise of his coworkers, or at least not yet. 

The second box is moving. 

″Mother Mary,″ Nicky says in a breath, because he's not sure if he wants to open it. He's also a little disturbed that there are no air holes in the box, because if Andy is going to kidnap humans and/or animals for culinary experimentation then the least she can do is give them some oxygen; the box is also the only one that has been clearly marked. On the top of the box, in Andy's elegant scrawl, are the words: LIVE LOBSTERS, DO NOT FREEZE.

″Is this seriously a box of live lobsters?″ he asks himself.

It shouldn't be a box of live lobsters, because they don't serve lobster and also because they have nowhere to keep them, and no paperwork for them that the health inspector is most certainly going to look for – because why would they have paperwork for something that isn't on the menu in the first place. But yes, it's totally a box of live lobsters – lobsters that Andy probably got off the black market and drove over to the restaurant in her car, maybe buckled up in the back seat, because she is absolutely a crazy person. 

There is probably something Nicky needs to do for the long term for these lobsters, but right now he's working on the short term and the best course of action is to sometimes pretend there is nothing wrong whatsoever. He heaves the box up onto a lower shelf and moves a box of raw, center-cut bacon right on top of it. The bacon box covers up Andy's note, which leaves Nicky free to fish his marker out of his coat pocket and write in huge, bold letters on the side of the box: ″BACON PIECES.″ He follows it up with the current date and a stab in the dark at how long leftover pieces of pork should be refrigerator stable. This is something that Nile can fix later; Nile is pretty much the go-to for fixing Andy’s crazy ideas.

The last box contains printer paper and four bottles of window cleaner and is inside the walk-in for reasons that are beyond Nicky; he still doesn't understand how some people manage to obtain loans, and buy property, and start their restaurant when he can't even get a credit card. He heaves the box up onto his shoulder without toppling over and turns around just in time for the door to swing open. 

The health inspector moves past him like he's not even standing there, clipboard in hand and a pinched expression on his face. Quyhn is standing in the doorway, looking as though she's aged four years in the past hour and also looking like she might be considering closing the restaurant for the day at nine in the morning. There is a crash from the kitchen, followed by a yelping that could only be from Dizzy, and Quyhn glances briefly at the ceiling as though wishing for patience, or perhaps a place to bury a body. 

Nicky staggers past her with the box on his shoulder and offers her a supportive smile. ″Just think: it's not even ten yet.″

Quyhn eyes the box like one might eye a haphazardly tied hyena, but she doesn't ask about it – just moves her attention back to where the inspector is scrutinizing every square inch of their giant refrigerator. 

″Don't remind me,″ she says.

  
  


-/-

“If the recipe says one gallon of pureed tomatoes,” Booker says, later that morning, and his tone is observational, “then why does this look like a vat of pure ketchup?”

″It’s possible I don’t know what a gallon is,″ Nicky admits, as they stare into the stockpot where the very, very soupy chili is bubbling away. It should be thicker, and meatier, and not as… tomatoey, but it’s also the first week they’ve had it on the menu so maybe Nicky should be forgiven for not knowing what it should look like at a glance. Chili isn’t something he’s had a lot of experience with. 

Booker maintains eye contact the entire time he dips a testing spoon into the mixture and then takes a bite. The grimace is a little much - it can’t possibly be  _ that _ far off from the recipe. 

“I’ll just triple the other ingredients and we’ll put it on special,” Nicky reasons, with a shrug.

“We don’t even have a pot big enough to make a triple batch of chili.”

“So we separate it into three smaller batches.”

Booker taps his spoon on the front of Nicky’s chef coat and gives him a look. “Andy would say throw it out and start over.”

“I know what Andy would say,” Nicky says, sullen. “That’s why I didn’t ask her.”

Booker shrugs and moves around him, to go back to his own prep work. Nicky sighs loudly, turns the burner off, and carries the heavy stockpot back to dish to dispose of the soup properly. 

Things stay relatively quiet for about an hour after that, right up until Andy bursts in, the box of still moving lobsters in her arms, and proclaims that they've decided to be part of the ″Dine Out″ week that the city seems to think is going to get people out of their houses and spending money. Which is not really all that strange a thing for her to say, but Quyhn is standing behind her with a look of horror on her face and a clipboard in hand and that always makes everyone a little more wary. 

″We were only able to get in on it for the last night, which is next Sunday, and we're booked solid,″ she says, waving the clipboard a little. ″For the entire night. From four to close. Patio and dining room and I had people asking if they could sit on the floor-″

″Apparently there's a knitting convention in town,″ Andy says, waving her hand nonchalantly. ″An extra two hundred thousand people in the economy can only benefit us.″

“Who goes to a knitting convention?” Booker asks, at the same time Nile yells, ″Two hundred thousand!?″

“We're booked solid on a Sunday night?” Copley asks, and he's already looking through his charts and notes with a pinched expression.

“I see we're updating our menu – and our prices,” Nicky notes, in regards to the squirming lobsters.

Andy flashes him a bright grin, like a proud schoolteacher. “Exactly! We're changing our prix fixe menu to include 'Lobster Benedict.' Oh, Nile, that reminds me – I need English muffins.”

“Do you maybe see the inherent logistical and morale-leaching problems with changing the menu every four hours?” Quyhn asks her wife. “By which I mean actual mutiny.”

Andy scoffs, tossing the box of lobsters at Booker – who flails around to catch it without dropping live crustaceans on the floor. They are all officially characters in a sitcom. “Oh, please. Have you seen what I pay them? I should mutiny.” 

Actually, all in all, a sudden change in the prix fixe menu spells only good things for Nicky; the fewer mushrooms he has to carve out of radishes the better. Although the new printout Andy hands him for prep work is obscenely long, with a gaggle of seriously time consuming garnishes that will probably end up falling off the plates because their servers have nothing but disdain for intricate plate design when it affects their ability to carry ten at once.

Nile starts flipping through a personal recipe binder with more disdain than English muffins probably warrant. 

“I'm allergic to shellfish,” Copley says, eyeing Booker's box warily. 

“I'm allergic to extra work without extra pay,” Nicky chimes in.

“I can't hear any of you,” Andy replies, and she picks up her own clipboard. “I hope you're all standing around because you're completely done with the meager amount of prep work I scheduled you.”

“Actual mutiny,” Quyhn says again, but the kitchen is already back in motion.

-/-

Nicky knew how to cook before he started working at  _ The Old Guard _ . Cooking is an essential life skill that he learned from a young age and he’s learned enough from his mother to make a few presentable dishes in a pinch. Making his mother proud had been the main priority behind learning how to cook, and if it tasted good then all the better. Home cooking and restaurant cooking, as Nicky has sort of figured out, are not necessarily super different. The ingredients may be nicer, and the equipment is definitely better, and he may be learning a few techniques and skills that are definitely indispensable, but the methods are not so wildly different that he feels completely lost. 

His kitchen now versus his kitchen a year ago are laughably different. Because now he appreciates the difference between the knives he picked up at Target and the ones that Andy made him custom order from some specialty store that may have actually required fingerprinting in the ordering process. He appreciates the difference between crafting a recipe versus throwing together everything in the fridge on top of pasta. Which is not to say that he doesn't use his Target knives (secretly, at home, when he doesn't think any of his restaurant friends might come over) and he does still eat pasta with nothing on it but butter and Parmesan when he gets home late and nothing else sounds even remotely palatable. It means that he has an appreciation for both sides.

His apartment is (to be realistic) kind of shitty. His “kitchen” is essentially a mini fridge and a hot plate, which had been enough a year ago but is now trying his patience and newfound creativity something fierce. He knows he's not the greatest chef in the world, but he's also pretty sure even Gordon Ramsey probably couldn't make a souffle on that damned hot plate. There's a single countertop – on which his microwave is sitting – and he usually chops vegetables with his cutting board balanced precariously over the sink. All in all, it's not the greatest set-up, but he makes it work; he's actually managed to get himself into the habit of making dinner at least three days a week, which is a one hundred percent increase in culinary productivity in his apartment from a year ago.

From time to time his friends do come over and he does cook for them, but nine times out of ten the friend in question is Joe. The restaurant isn’t open on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday and there’s a good chance one of those days Joe will text him with fifteen minutes advance notice that he is coming over with a bottle of wine and a movie Nicky hasn’t seen. Then he gets to experience how clean his apartment can become in fifteen minutes (which is not so much clean as it is rediscovering how much his only closet can hold at a moment's notice and how many square feet of his bathroom he can scrub with the remaining time). 

Joe comes over on Wednesday night, with a plastic bag of Chinese takeout and a bottle of wine in a language Nicky can’t read yet. He’s dressed surprisingly sharp for a night spent making fun of Nicky’s inability to discern British accents while eating cheap Chinese food and Nicky can’t help the once over he gives him.

“I may have snuck off in the middle of a date,” Joe tells him, as he comes inside and places the takeout containers onto Nicky’s tiny coffee table. “Don’t judge me too harshly. You would have made the same decision if you were in my shoes.”

Nicky’s heart leaps into his throat at the word ‘date’, but he has no right to feel any sort of way about it. He laughs, closing and locking the door behind Joe. He moves into the kitchen to grab two glasses and a handful of napkins. When he returns to the living area the takeout containers are open and Joe is messing with Nicky’s ancient laptop in an attempt at getting a movie started for them. 

“Tell me about it then,” Nicky says, as he sinks down onto the sofa and grabs one of the white containers and a pair of chopsticks. “Do you need a shoulder to cry on? Should we put on The Notebook while we talk?”

“American Psycho would be more accurate,” Joe mutters, and finally gets the movie to start playing on Nicky’s television. He moves around the coffee table and takes a seat next to Nicky on the sofa, grabbing his own container as he goes. “He argued with the hostess about our seating being too near the kitchen three times. He asked to be moved  _ three _ times, Nico.”

Nicky laughs again and shrugs his shoulders. “Some people want the experience to be good. Maybe he didn’t want to see his food being made.”

“Oh, I’m not done yet,” Joe says, holding his chopsticks up and gesturing between them with them. “This trainwreck has only just begun, my friend.”

“Maybe I’m not ready,” Nicky concedes, smiling around a mouthful of orange chicken and Joe descends into a recount of a date that sounds like the soundtrack to why Nicky doesn’t date anymore. There are plenty of times that they've sat on his couch, watching late night television and eating horribly fattening take out, that he wonders if this is what it would be like dating him. He wonders if this is what it would be like to live with him - that they could just do this every night after work instead of once a week on their days off. 

Despite his original intention to think about living with Joe as little as possible and then finding some way to politely decline the upgrade in housing, Nicky has thought non stop about moving in with Joe since he brought it up. He’s thought about what it might be like to come home to the same place after working the same shift, ordering takeout together or waiting while Nicky throws something edible together at a moment’s notice, and it all sounds like it might be just unimaginably  _ domestic _ . 

“So then,” Joe says, pausing for dramatic effect, “he orders for me.”

Nicky shakes his head, unable to keep the smile from his face, and takes another bite of lo mein. 

“He says, and I quote, ‘Don’t worry, I took high school French,’ and he orders for the both of us.”

“That was when you told him you studied for a year in Lyon, yes?” 

“Oh, you think I could get a word in? He would have had to have stopped talking about himself for a minute for that to happen. To be honest it felt like I was the third wheel and he was trying to go on a date with himself. Or, perhaps me, but if I had glued mirrors to every inch of my body.”

“Don’t get distracted. So he orders for you in remedial French.”

“He orders us both the porc aux pruneaux-”

Nicky gestures at him with his chopsticks. “You can’t eat pork.”

“I can’t eat pork,” Joe repeats, because it bears repeating. He swallows another bite of food before continuing. “So I told him I was going to go find our server to change my order and slipped out the kitchen entrance with help from a sympathetic busser.”

“Your dating life is like an action movie,” Nicky tells him, refilling both of their wine glasses. “Fewer explosions maybe.”

“Metaphorical explosions,” Joe assures him. “Catastrophic social explosions that cannot be recovered from. You should have heard him trying to seduce me in half remembered French. Booker would have pissed himself laughing.”

Nicky laughs into his hand and takes another drink. “Maybe you are too critical?”

“Ma cherie, your eyes are like beautiful orbs I can see my own reflection in-”

“ _ Ma cherie _ ,” Nicky repeats, almost choking on his wine. He has to sit his glass down and take a deep breath. 

“No,” Joe says, holding up a finger to make a point. “This man referred to me as a beautiful young lady twice. It was no slip of the tongue.”

Nicky wipes his mouth on the back of his hand and sinks further into the couch, unable to keep the grin from his face. 

“Maybe his French was not the problem. Maybe it was your feminine wiles that led him astray. Perhaps he thought-” he cuts off, laughing, as Joe leans back with a loud groan and rubs at his face with both hands. “Perhaps he thought the beard was an accessory.”

Joe shakes his head and drains his second glass, sitting it on the coffee table. They’ve made an impressive dent in the Chinese food, but there’s still enough leftovers that Nicky isn’t going to have to worry about dinner for at least another night. The movie is playing in the background and Nicky couldn’t even begin to say what it’s about, or what the title is, or who it stars. 

“This is the man who gave you his number the other night at the restaurant?” Nicky asks. “The one Lykon was ribbing you about?”

“I know, I know. This is what I get for going on a date with a customer. Don’t rub it in. He seemed nice enough and he tipped well, how was I to know?” Joe grabs up the leftovers and carries them into the kitchen to put them into the fridge. When he comes back, Nicky has refilled their glasses again.

“Don’t discuss your dating life where Quyhn or Andy can hear you,” Nicky advises him. “They want everyone to be as sickeningly in love as they are, so they foist off all their single friends upon each other.”

“Too late,” Joe says, around the rim of his glass. He takes another drink and then continues, “They set me up with a lovely young lady, Florence, the first week I got hired. She was a lesbian, mind you, who had thought ‘Joe’ was short for “Joanna’ so you can imagine the kind of date we had.”

“Another prospect charmed by your feminine wiles,” Nicky agrees solemnly, grinning cheekily at Joe when he reaches out to smack Nicky’s elbow playfully. “Quyhn and Andy live in their own world. One unhindered by gender or sexual preference. A free spirited, free loving sort of world, if you will.”

“They mean well,” Joe says, like that makes their meddling any more tolerable. 

They finish watching the movie and Joe leaves around midnight. Nicky watches from the lobby door to make sure he gets to his Uber safely, before going back up to his apartment and cleaning up their empty glasses. He sinks back onto the couch and stares for a long time at the blank television, but the wine in his system makes him feel anxious in a way that makes it hard to settle. 

He pulls out his phone and re-downloads Tinder. He changes his preferences from ‘interested in women’ to ‘interested in men’, saves the changes, and then sets his phone on the coffee table gently - like it might come to life if he jostles it too roughly. His face feels flush, warm, and he can’t tell if it’s from the wine or from something else. 

-/-

There are probably things in the world that are more awful than the restaurant come Sunday evening, but Nicky is hard pressed to think of even one. Sunday is, hands down, the hardest shift he's had to overcome thus far in the restaurant business. The morning is hectic purely due to the lack of prep work that was able to be completed the day before. He gets there around four in the morning, drinks seven coffees before noon, and then he spends his entire lunch break sleeping in the dining room like normal. The afternoon prep is worse because there are people arriving at three o'clock for their four o'clock reservations, but  _ The Old Guard's  _ waiting room is really only intended for a handful of people at best and Quyhn refuses to let them sit outside in the cold and rain. So they end up sitting in the dining room, which makes the servers antsy as they prepare for service – which makes the kitchen antsy – and it's just a matter of the night getting off to a bad start. 

Things are busy from the get-go.  _ The Old Guard  _ is run by tyrants and, as such, is a well oiled machine more than capable of handling whatever is thrown at it, but it doesn't necessarily make the ordeal any more pleasant. They're running through a prixe fixe menu that they've only known about for about a few days, which means they've had absolutely zero time to practice and even less time to remember what they're even serving. Nicky alternates between checking the menu, and making salads, and chasing appetizers out the door to add forgotten garnishes. Chef Andy stands at her printer, shouting order and expediting plates, possibly with dollar signs in her eyes, and the rest of the restaurant struggles to keep up. 

Nile is everywhere. She's on the line, then she's expediting with Andy, and then she's desperately trying to revive a Hollandaise. Andy is right there to make executive decisions and to call out their proteins as they come in, but Nile is making some serious magic happen behind the scenes. Their ticket times are somehow still right where they should be, and the two undercooked steaks they had sent back get fixed and re-plated without any extra delay, and she even dips off to the back to prep tomatoes when Nicky starts to run low. She shifts seamlessly from one station to another, wherever she's needed, and she knows everything about their menu – and how to prepare it – and she adjusts with changes like she's in possession of a computerized brain. There's no pause for her, just an endless dance around the kitchen that ends in dishes finishing on time and plates going out on schedule. Nile is a machine – an absolute machine.

There are problems, upon problems, upon problems. Celeste drops five bowls of soup in one go, while Lykon forgets to alert them to a seafood allergy at one of his tables, during which Quyhn is asking if they think it's possible to squeeze in another two diners they hadn't had room for before but now maybe they magically do. Nile gets five new soups out without compromising the orders they already have, and she personally makes certain the dishes for Lykon's table are remade under strict supervision, and she let's Quyhn do what she will because there's really no controlling her in host-mode anyway. 

For the longest time Nicky had been sort of under the impression that Andy wasn't really into the whole chef thing. He had thought that maybe, because she often stood back and did very little to actually assist, it was all because she would rather just be the eccentric maestro of the kitchen. Sunday night shows him that it's not really any of those things. Because what Andy has actually been doing all along is preparing Nile to succeed in her new role. Andy stands off, and she watches the hurricane that is her kitchen, and she watches her protege take complete and total control over all aspects of it. Which, essentially, is exactly what she's been training her to do. 

At the end of the night the kitchen is fairly destroyed. Coincidentally, so is the staff.

“I have no idea what I made tonight,” Joe says, in reference to his tips, with his head on the table, “but it wasn't enough.”

“I can't feel my feet,” Lykon says. 

“You are all dead to me,” Nile tells them, but the veracity of her statement is a little downplayed by the fact that she's half asleep on Booker.

The fact that it's Sunday means that the following three days are those in which the restaurant will be closed, which means there are three days during which Nicky will hibernate like a bear full of salmon. There is a pile of prep work he'll have to worry about on Thursday, but it's not Thursday currently and he's not going to worry about it on his days off.

Joe drives him home again and a Sunday night seems like the perfect time to casually toss in a suggestion of late night coffee or any other excuse to hang out for a little longer, but it doesn’t happen that way. Nicky falls asleep on the short ride to his own apartment, with his face pressing uncomfortably against the cold glass of the window. He doesn't realize he's fallen asleep until they're outside his apartment and Joe is shaking him gently, with a light grip on his elbow. He wakes with a slight start and by then it seems silly to make any suggestions whatsoever to extend their night. Which feels a little like a cop-out, but he's still half-asleep and a little groggy and a million miles from feeling confident enough to flirt with anyone. 

Which is probably what puts him in such a weird headspace that, instead of going directly to sleep when he gets upstairs to his apartment, he finds a plethora of messages waiting for him on Tinder and dives into that rabbit hole instead. He sets up a couple of dates for his days off. It almost feels like his fingers are typing without his consent, firing off places and times and smiley face emojis that he’s using but doesn’t necessarily feel. His brain is overworked, and his heart is strangely heavy, but he schedules them all the same and then falls asleep on top of all of his blankets.


	4. Chapter 3

The amount of men who match with and message Nicky between Sunday night at half past midnight and Monday morning at eleven is daunting. Nicky lays in bed staring at the messages and clicking on nothing. He had woken up because his phone had buzzed with a text from Booker, asking if he was interested in brunch and bottomless mimosas with him and Lykon, only to see the alert of new messages in his notification bar. He would much rather eat Eggs Benedict with friends than exchange stilted small talk with strangers, but he’s trying very desperately to step out of his comfort zone and to push himself in - well, maybe not the right direction, but a direction nonetheless. 

He declines brunch with Booker, because he doesn’t feel like he should answer messages after six mimosas, and opens up the app. There are eleven messages, which is eleven more than Nicky would have guessed he would have had even if his profile had been up for three times as long as it had been. It makes him wonder if maybe he hadn’t filled his profile out right, or maybe he’d uploaded a picture that had sent the wrong sort of message, but it’s all too late to worry about that now. He starts going through his messages one by one, trying to not feel obligated to reply to any of them, and immediately feels overwhelmed by the prospect of having to meet any of these people. Which isn’t to say the messages are bad, or that there’s an excess of eggplant emojis or lewd comments, but Nicky has never been as social as he feels dating really truly calls for. 

By noon he’s exchanged fairly innocuous messages with a handful of men who seem capable of complete sentences and who are looking for more than a quick hook up. The first guy he sets a date up with is Robert, who does something in real estate that is no doubt important but is beyond Nicky’s comprehension. Robert is twenty five, is inoffensively attractive in his profile picture, and is suspiciously enthusiastic about Nicky’s hesitant foray into dating men. He’s up front about his newness to the world of dating men because he thinks it’s something someone would want to know, before they really get their feet wet, and because he doesn’t think he’s going to be able to fake being an out and proud gay man for an evening. 

‘ _ We all have to start somewhere,’ _ Robert had messaged him, which was then followed immediately thereafter by a suggestion to partake in the happy hour at Chili’s which Nicky was quick to veto in lieu of something casual but infinitely more palatable. It’s a nice outlook to have on the prospect of dating a man unsure if he still considers himself straight or not, but Nicky is nervous regardless. He knows this isn’t exactly a marriage proposal and that all they have planned is a super chill dinner on a Monday night with no strings attached, but it still feels like a monumental step for Nicky. 

They meet Monday night at Nicky’s suggested restaurant and Robert looks like he came straight from work, wearing nicely pressed chinos and a button up, and Nicky looks like himself because that’s all he’s got to work with. The initial meeting is as awkward as Nicky would have expected it to be - Robert hugs him weakly, for just long enough for it to be weird - and they manage to get a seat inside without needing reservations. 

“So a chef, that’s exciting,” Robert says, after they’ve ordered and their drinks have arrived. He’s drinking cheap American beer, despite this place being known for their local IPAs, and Nicky wonders if he realizes the burger he ordered is going to be bison and not beef. “I knew someone once who made the donuts at Dunkin Donuts. He used to always smell like oil and sugar. You smell great though!”

“Sometimes I shower,” Nicky says in response, but the comment doesn’t earn him so much as an amused smile; the guy seems to take him at face value, which doesn’t bode well for Nicky’s sense of humor. 

Nicky is not overly talkative and has never been good at filling silences, but he’s determined to try his best - to give this whole experiment the serious dedication it deserves. His dating future is basically depending upon him taking this seriously. So they talk about work, and they talk about the movies they don’t have in common, and Robert sends his food back twice because he doesn’t know how to read or understand a menu that doesn’t come with pictures. 

Instead of trying to think of more things to say, Nicky busies himself with downing the rest of his beer. Robert drones on and on about some difficult clients he had dealt with earlier that day, and Nicky eats his own burger long before Robert has even gotten a quarter through his. They manage to find common ground in complaining about commuting and road construction and it makes the conversation over dinner less stilted while still feeling like he’s talking to a stranger on the train rather than someone he’s agreed to go on a proper date with. 

Nicky asks their server for separate cheques before anything weird can happen and he says goodbye to Robert at the restaurant rather than walking with him to get an Uber. It’s not the worst outcome he could have had, but he still takes a deep breath when he gets back to his own apartment and feels like a crippling weight has been lifted from his shoulders. He pours himself a glass of wine and is halfway through it when he gets a text from Robert asking for a second date. He doesn’t reply.

  
  


-/-

  
  


Tuesday night he goes on a date with Isaac, who picks their restaurant, and the time they’re meeting, and who insists four separate times that he can pick Nicky up no problem just tell me where you live. Nicky takes an Uber, because he figures his chances of being murdered and left in the trunk of a car in a parking lot somewhere are lower that way, and meets him at their designated spot five minutes early. 

Isaac turns out to be enthusiastic and exuberant, rather than serial killer-esque, and he insists on a lot of things that Nicky either doesn’t have any opinion on or doesn’t think are worth wasting time on. He goes out of his way to ensure they’re seated on the back patio, at a table that is directly between two of the heat lamps but also charmingly close to the outdoor fire pit in the center of the patio, and for a second it almost seems like he’s going to try to pull out Nicky’s chair for him. 

“Have you been here before?” Isaac asks, and, although he hasn’t, Nicky gets the impression that saying he has would destroy one of Isaac’s carefully constructed pieces of this evening. He shakes his head ‘no’, and Isaac continues, “Great! I can make some fantastic suggestions. What kind of food do you like?”

Which is an exhausting question to ask someone who cooks and tastes food for a living, who spends his entire day trying Nile’s crazy concoctions she comes up with while trying to replicate Andy’s recipes that always consist of ingredients but never measurements. It’s an odd question to ask someone in general - like taste can be summed up like a genre of books - but he doesn’t comment on it. 

“I’m not picky,” he says instead, because he’s trying to put his best foot forward. He doesn’t need a recommendation or a suggestion on what to order, but he’s not opposed to taking one to humor his date. 

Isaac starts in listing off dishes, to the point where it sounds almost like he’s just reading the list of specials, and Nicky feigns the same interest he would if it were his server standing over the table rattling off the day’s fish and soup. Inevitably their server does arrive, and she does go over the same specials that Isaac was just introducing him to, and Nicky is fortunately a very patient man. 

Isaac orders wine for the both of them, something red that would go great with the steak or sea bass, and Nicky orders the chicken just to be contrary. There’s a vein in Isaac’s forehead that seems more prominent the more stressed he gets - the more the date veers off his very carefully formulated path - and Nicky pretends he’s not slowly going out of his way to make sure they get derailed. 

Isaac is a student at the university Nicky just recently dropped out of and who is an art history student with a flair for jazz music. He mentions twice that there’s a jazz club nearby that’s open late and Nicky can’t think of anything he’d like to do less. The restaurant he’s chosen for them is enjoyable, the food is pleasant, and the wine is good even if he wishes he had a mojito instead. Isaac asks open ended questions that keep the conversation going, that force Nicky to talk about himself more than he typically tries to, but Nicky can feel his own disinterest laying thick over their conversation like a cloud. Isaac is a good looking man, but Nicky isn’t attracted to him - hasn’t once entertained the idea of seeing him a second time - and their date quickly turns into what feels like hanging out and getting a beer with a friend. 

Isaac doesn’t seem to get the same feeling. Twice he leans across the table to swat at Nicky’s hand when he makes a dry joke that truly doesn’t warrant more than a lazy chuckle. His face is pink from the wine, even though he’s only had a little more than a glass, and he’s gazing at Nicky like Nicky has descended down from the clouds in order to grace him with his presence. 

At the end of the night Isaac picks up the cheque before Nicky can offer an alternative and offers twice to give Nicky a ride back to his apartment. Nicky declines and gets an Uber. They part amicably, but Nicky still feels relief when he’s gone. 

James is on Wednesday night, but Nicky texts him to reschedule for later in the week, feigning illness, and fortunately gets off the hook. He doesn’t think he can stomach a third date in a row. So instead he sleeps all day on Wednesday and does his laundry and tries not to think about whether or not his dates with men were failures because they were with men or because they were with men other than Joe. 

Joe texts him Wednesday night, like clockwork, and all it says is,  _ “History channel right now. You’re missing Aliens in Ancient Rome. _ ” and Nicky smiles at the dumb message until his face hurts. 

  
  


-/-

Nicky meets Nile at their spot on Thursday morning and he goes into work like always - like he hadn’t wasted his days off testing a theory that had ended up crashing and burning sort of spectacularly. He does his share of the prep list, and he takes a nap in the dining room, and he feels almost back to normal by the time Joe shows up at two thirty and places a garish red-colored smoothie beside him on the prep table. 

“The color is from the beets,” Joe assures him, which does nothing to make it any more visually appealing. He has already changed out of his workout clothes and into his black button-up and trousers, but has yet to put on his apron. “Beets, wheatgrass, cacao nibs, and blueberries. It’s simple.”

“Strawberry banana smoothies are simple,” Nicky says, placing his paring knife down onto the cutting board and eying the smoothie with unrestrained disdain. “An orange Julius. That is simple. Nothing you bring me is ever simple, Joe.”

“ _ You’re _ simple,” Joe says, good natured. “I’ll bring you apple juice tomorrow and tell you it’s something else and then watch as you scrunch your nose up at it like a fussy six year old.”

Nicky rolls his eyes and, always braver in the kitchen than he is anywhere else, takes a sip of the smoothie. It’s truly not horrendous, but it’s also not something Nicky would ever voluntarily pay money for. Not for the first time he wonders if Joe creates these mixtures himself or if there’s some sort of endlessly revolting menu he’s making his selections based on. He’s never had the same smoothie twice.

“I eat my fruits and vegetables,” Nicky assures him, setting the smoothie back onto the prep table. Each swallow leaves his mouth dryer than before. “Unlike you I don’t need them pureed in a milkshake to enjoy them.”

“No, no, you just wrap them in prosciutto or deep fry them and serve them with tomato sauce,” Joe says, raising an eyebrow. “I’ve seen the way you eat, Nico. Don’t even.”

“Everything tastes good wrapped in prosciutto,” Nicky says. “This smoothie would be improved tenfold if it were wrapped in prosciutto.”

Joe rolls his eyes and turns to go start in on his side work.

Across the kitchen, Booker mimes swooning and Nicky makes a vaguely threatening gesture in his direction with his paring knife.

Nicky busies himself with finishing up the garnishes he’ll need for that evening and then gets to work helping Nile filet salmon. It keeps him occupied and it makes time pass quickly, and he has to keep his eye on the fish rather than where Joe is filling salt shakers across the kitchen. His eyes are always drawn to Joe, no matter where he happens to be, and he knows more than once he’s been caught staring. Joe never calls him on it - just gives him a smile and goes back to what he was doing - and Nicky tries not to read too much into it. 

Nile would tell him he’s being an idiot if she knew he’d wasted time dating random men on Tinder, but she doesn’t know and therefore she can’t berate him for it. It doesn’t mean she doesn’t meddle all the same. 

“So let’s say it doesn’t work out,” she hypothesizes, as she pulls a filet off of her salmon, at a low enough volume that Nicky feels confident no one can overhear. “You ask him out, maybe he says yes or maybe he says no, but either way it doesn’t work out. What’s the worst that could happen?”

Nicky doesn’t even look up from his own fish. He’s had this own conversation plenty of times in his own mind, so he doesn’t even need to think about his answer. 

“The worst that could happen would be he never speaks to me again and I lose a cherished friend,” he says. 

“No one calls their bro a ‘cherished friend’,” Nile reasons, leveling him with an unamused look. “Straight men definitely don’t.”

“Booker told me last week he treasures our friendship and he’s straight-”

Nile rolls her eyes. “You can’t use Booker. Booker is  _ French _ -”

“I’m  _ Italian- _ ”

“Look,” Nile waves a hand dismissively at him, as though he has no leg to stand on when it comes to this argument. “Okay. Granted. Absolute worst case scenario is he stops talking to you. But does that  _ sound _ like him? Does that sound like something he would do?”

It doesn’t. It doesn’t sound like something Joe would do. That’s not entirely the point.

“You asked what I was afraid of and I told you,” Nicky reasons. “Fear is not always rational.”

“But if you know it’s not rational-”

“Let’s say it does not end that way,” Nicky continues, and he places his knife down onto the workstation counter. He rests both palms on the counter and gives Nile his full attention. “Let us say I tell him and he is overjoyed. He feels the same. We go out together and have a wonderful evening, but when the night ends he leans in to kiss me and I lean away. Because  _ I _ am unsure. Because  _ I _ do not know what I want.”

Nile continues to wave her hand at him. “You laugh it off? You remind him you need to go slow because you’re a baby gay who doesn’t know what he’s doing? You don’t think Joe, of all people, knows what you’re going through?”

“I don’t even know what I’m going through,” Nicky reminds her. “That’s the point.”

“The point is you’re making this ten times more complicated than it needs to be.”

“Well,” Nicky says, picking his knife back up, “like I said. I am Italian.”

They finish with the salmon just in time for dinner service.   
  


-/-

  
  


Nicky ends up at a bar a few blocks away from his own apartment with James on Friday night, after the restaurant has closed. He’s got his chef coat stuffed into his backpack, which he sticks underneath the barstool, and he smells like a mixture of grilled fish and hickory smoke, but James is a good enough guy to not comment on it. They sit at the bar itself, while the flirty young redheaded bartender makes a show of pouring drinks, and it’s not much to say that it’s the more comfortable of the three dates he’s gone on. That isn’t to say it’s good - it’s just to say that in a garbage pile of dates it’s not the worst one.

James talks about the tech startup he’s just recently started working for, and he asks Nicky about his hobbies and about what the last movie he saw was, and it’s not bad. Or, rather, it could be worse.

“I just love your accent,” James says, and he has a very nice smile. He has very straight, very white teeth, and his left hand is resting on Nicky’s right knee. “You could probably read the drink menu and I’d hang on every word. What part of Italy did you say you were from?”

“Are you asking so you can pretend to know where it is or so you can compliment me on my English?” Nicky asks, and he thinks maybe the dryness in his tone is misread because all it does is make James laugh. 

“You know, I admit, I thought you were going to be shy, but I’m glad that’s not the case,” he says, winking at Nicky and taking another sip of his drink. He squeezes Nicky’s knee before he moves his hand away and it makes Nicky feel twitchy in a way it probably shouldn’t if the entire purpose of these experiments is to see how he likes interacting intimately with other men. “I’m going to step out for a smoke. I’ll be right back.”

Nicky exhales slowly and resists the urge to rest his forehead against the sticky bartop. 

This dating thing is going exponentially better than he had originally anticipated, but all that means is that it’s less of a horror movie and more a comedy of errors. None of the men he’s gone out with so far have been egregiously bad and none of the dates have felt particularly like a train wreck out of his control, but that isn’t to say that anything has gone  _ well _ . This was supposed to give Nicky some insight on what it might be like to date a man, to see if maybe he wasn’t as straight as he had initially thought, but all it's done is reaffirm his opinion that dating is the worst social exercise anyone can participate in. 

He checks his phone and there is a text message from Joe inviting him to go out drinking with him and Nile, but the message is from almost an hour ago and Nicky doesn’t even recognize the name of the bar. It’s probably for the best. He already spends such a huge chunk of his time with Joe - whether that be at the restaurant during working hours or lounging at each other’s apartment and watching terrible television while eating worse takeout. If his brand new modus operandi is to gauge his interest in people outside of Joe then he’s really going to have to make an effort not to spend all his time with Joe.

On the other hand, he  _ enjoys _ spending time with Joe. He does not enjoy dating and changing his dating pool from random women to random men has not sweetened that any.

He glances back towards the door, trying to convince himself that sneaking out in the middle of a date isn’t him, when divine intervention takes place. There’s a shoulder nudging against his own, familiar and knowing, and when he turns around to look at who it is he comes face to face with Nile’s raised eyebrows. 

“ _ Merda _ ,” Nicky mutters, running a hand through his hair. “Is this the bar you’re drinking at? Really?”

“Correction: this is the third bar we’ve been to,” Nile says, and she does sound like she’s had a few, but she still manages to lift the right number of fingers to signal ‘three’ to him. She gestures to the empty bar stool next to him and says. “Did you blow us off to go drink alone? You been taking advice from Booker, is that it?”

“Tell me Joe isn’t here,” Nicky continues, ignoring her for a minute to glance past her, to look around at where she might have come from to see if there’s a familiar bearded face in the crowd. “Lie to me if you have to, Nile.”

“I think he’s still in the alley. We ran into some friends of his that were leaving and I left to go get us a spot,” Nile pauses, liquor addled-brain spinning slowly but surely. “I was joking earlier, but do you really not want to see us?”

“Nile, you are a dear friend, and I need you to promise me I can tell you this in confidence,” Nicky says, turning to place both hands on her shoulders.

Nile’s eyebrows raise again. “Uh, okay. You have my word. Are you in trouble with the mafia?”

“I’m on a date,” Nicky says, wondering if it would be easier to explain away ties with the mafia. He continues, stressing his meaning, “And it’s imperative to me that Joe not know.”

“Why would Joe give a shit? You’re allowed to have your own life outside of work, Nicky-”

“Nicky, is this a friend of yours?”

Nicky freezes and Nile’s eyes glance beyond him to where James has returned from his smoke break and is standing nearby. Nicky can’t see the expression on his face, because his back is still turned, but the expression on Nile’s own face is carefully blank. Despite the dawning realization he knows she’s experiencing - because he knows her well enough at this point to know when all of her cylinders are firing - she maintains a surprising amount of outward calm. 

She reaches past him, to hold out her hand, and says, without hesitating, “I’m his wife, Nile. Have we met?”

“Jesus, Joseph, and Mary,” Nicky says, and this time he does let his forehead hit the bartop. 

“His wife,” James repeats, and there’s an almost resigned tone to his voice that makes Nicky wonder how often this sort of thing happens to him. He feels a little bad to add one more on to that, but not bad enough to correct Nile. “Of course you are. I was just going, actually.”

“Oh no, please stay, we’re celebrating our fifteenth wedding anniversary,” Nile says, rubbing her hand up and down Nicky’s back. “Isn’t that right, darling?”

Nicky lifts his head up when he notices the bartender grabbing his glass and says, without looking at either James or Nile, “I’ll take another. A double, please.”

“Well congratulations,” James says, and he finishes off his drink in one go before placing it back on the bar. “You kids have a good night.”

Nile continues awkwardly rubbing his back, like she’s waiting for him to throw up rather than appear loving, and then she says, after a moment has passed, “Okay, he’s gone.”

Nicky sits back up and hands his card to the bartender. It looks like he’ll be paying James’ tab as well, but he deserves nothing less. 

“I come to you because my house is burning down and you hand me lighter fluid,” he says, shrugging Nile’s hand off of his shoulder. “What would I do without you?”

“It’s time to build a new house, Nicky,” Nile tells him, and waves at where Joe has come back into the building. “Consider this your foundation.”

Joe is ecstatic to learn that Nicky has decided to join them for drinks after all. Nicky drains his double trying to ignore the knowing looks Nile is shooting him from over the rim of her own drink and orders another while simultaneously apologizing to the Nicky of tomorrow morning who is going to have to deal with this hangover. Present Nicky doesn’t have the willpower to deal with the night’s events, prior or currently unfolding, without the aid of alcohol thrumming through his system at full speed. 

They complain about work, and talk about Nile’s holiday plans with her family, and Nile and Joe get into an argument about an exhibit at the modern art museum they can’t agree on. They sit at one of the booths in the back corner of the bar and their server must be omniscient with how she pops over just as they finish a drink, but Nicky is only even vaguely aware of what’s going on around him. He’s deep in thought, watching the way Joe’s eyes light up when Nile starts bringing up sixteenth century artwork to support her argument, and he feels so desperately, unbearably out of his league and has no idea how to overcome that feeling.

Dating other men has done nothing but show him what it’s like to date men who are nothing like Joe. After all, who could ever be like Joe? Joe is smarter than any of the men who have messaged Nicky - smarter, and funnier, and better dressed - and of course Nicky is going to compare them all to him. Nicky is drowning underneath the weight of this feeling of helplessness, of feeling like what he wants is both right at his fingertips and also far out of his reach, and he doesn’t know how to make it better. 

Nile gets up to go to the restroom and Joe turns his attention onto Nicky without wasting a beat. 

“What do you think of it?” he asks, as though Nicky has been following along enough to make any substantial addition to their conversation. It wouldn’t matter - he always asks for Nicky’s input. 

Nicky ‘hms’ thoughtfully and down the rest of his drink. He doesn’t know which number he’s on, but he knows Joe and Nile, ever the loyal friends, are matching him drink for drink. 

“You’re quieter than normal tonight,” Joe says, leaning back in the booth and watching him with just enough intensity that Nicky wishes he still had his drink to hide behind. “I can see your gears turning from here.”

“It’s been a long week,” Nicky concedes, with a tired smile. He doesn’t elaborate on why it’s been a long week, but Joe nods knowingly all the same. 

“You push yourself too hard, Nicky,” he says. “You and Nile put so much into the restaurant. I hope it is giving you something back.”

“It gave me a few good friends,” Nicky replies, and waits until Joe has given him a warm smile before he continues, cheekily, “maybe I’ll introduce you to them someday.”

Joe presses a hand to his chest in feigned hurt. “Ouch. And after I invited you to go drinking with us.”

“Bar hopping,” Nicky corrects. “Nile already gave away this is your third location.”

“It wasn’t intended to be bar hopping. I saw an ex I wanted to avoid at the first bar and Nile bought a drink for a married woman with an extremely temperamental husband, so it’s less ‘bar hopping’ and more ‘bar fleeing’.”

Nicky snorts into his glass. “An ex? Was it your French lover from the other night?”

“I’ll have you know I have multiple regrettable exes to run into at a moment’s notice. A plethora, you might say. I have made my own fair share of poor choices,” Joe informs him, and then waves his hand dismissively. “And anyway that man wasn’t an ex. One date doesn’t make you an ex.”

“A half date,” Nicky corrects, and Joe lifts his glass in a mock toast. 

Nile comes back, only a little unsteady on her feet, and they finish up their drinks and close out their tab. She’s opening with Andy tomorrow and Nicky has to be at the restaurant at nine, so it’s as good a time as any to call it a night. 

It’s not raining when they stumble out onto the sidewalk in front of the bar, but there’s a low rumble of thunder in the distance that threatens rain all the same. The air is brisk and the other patrons gathered out front, smoking or waiting for a ride or talking in groups, are all dressed far more appropriately than the three of them who are still mostly in their work uniforms. Nile has her own chef coat thrown over one arm, as though she’d rather freeze than go out drinking while wearing a coat with her own name sewn into it, and she huddles between the two of them while they wait for an Uber. 

“We can share a ride if you want,” Nile offers, peering up at Nicky. “You’re on my way.”

“I’m close enough to walk,” Nicky tells her. “But I’ll wait with you and Joe.”

Joe mutters something unfriendly under his breath and shoots Nicky a look. “You’re not walking home. It’s after midnight.”

“I don’t turn into a pumpkin after midnight. I can walk four blocks.”

“Why don’t we walk you home and then catch a ride from your place?” Nile offers, ever the mediator. “Compromise?”

“Your ride is a block away,” Joe says, tapping Nile’s phone. “You take this one and I’ll walk Cinderella home and catch a lift from there.”

Nicky rolls his eyes and shifts his backpack onto his other shoulder. “You’re just looking for an excuse to disparage my neighborhood again.”

“I don’t need an excuse. It’s existence is reason enough. I’ve seen meth houses in better neighborhoods than your apartment.”

“Does that look like a tan Buick to you?” Nile asks, pointing at the car that pulls up to the curb. “I wanna say it’s brown. Maybe chocolate.”

“The license plates match so in you go,” Joe tells her, patting her briefly on the shoulder. “Don’t fall asleep without taking some aspirin.”

“You’re not my real mom,” Nile says, but gives Nicky a quick hug and then climbs into the back of her Uber all the same.

As the car pulls away, Joe gestures to the sidewalk and holds out his arm, as though waiting for Nicky to take it. “My fair lady?”

“You’re hilarious,” Nicky says dryly and pointedly shoves both his hands into his pockets.

The walk back to Nicky’s apartment is mostly uneventful. They pass a group of drunk college students who are arguing over quantum physics in the middle of the sidewalk, and they come across a young couple who cross the street to avoid them, and it continues to thunder ominously without raining the entire way back to Nicky’s apartment. It’s only a couple of blocks away from the bar, which is why Nicky had originally agreed to meet James there - so that he could walk home after and not need to catch a train or ride - and he’s walked it plenty of times by himself, even after midnight. It feels better to have Joe there; it always feels better to have Joe there.

“I believe beauty comes in all forms,” Joe explains, when they’re two blocks away. “All shapes and sizes, as it were. But this life drawing class is making me consider celibacy.”

Nicky laughs and adjusts the strap of his backpack from where it’s sliding off his shoulder. “Are you saying it’s not like some romance novel where the man or woman of your dreams lays themselves out for you and you make longing eyes over your canvas?”

“My mother has a saying. She says ‘Yusuf, there is a lid for every pot,’ and what she means is, of course, that there’s someone out there for everyone,” Joe explains, running a hand through his curls. “But she has not seen these… specimens. The first model had not bathed or brushed their teeth in so long I could smell them from my easel. I can still smell them. I may never stop being able to smell them.”

“They left a lasting impression,” Nicky surmises, and his lips pull into a grin at the look of abject horror that Joe casts at him with a sideways glance. “I feel like I told you that you would regret this class when you said you were taking it. I warned you ahead of time not to get your hopes up.”

“I didn’t have high hopes! I had very, very low hopes. I went into this without expectations and came out of it a changed man.”

“‘ _ Nicolo _ ,  _ the human body is a thing of beauty _ ,’” Nicky quotes, in a mimicry of Joe’s voice, laughing and dodging away when Joe reaches out to smack him in the arm. 

“I maintain that beauty comes in all forms,” Joe reasons. “I am also now of the opinion that humans are particularly adept at ruining this beauty with their terrible grooming and hygiene habits.”

“The human body is a temple-”

“A haunted temple. From a Japanese horror film.”

Nicky leans in, to bump his shoulder against Joe’s - companionable, friendly. They’ve left the bar after drinks together, they’ve walked together to Nicky’s apartment, and this isn’t so far removed from the dates Nicky’s been on this last week. There’s no reason not to imagine this would be what it is like to date Joe - just warm familiarity and comfortable conversation without motives or intentions - and Nicky does imagine it because he’s helpless to do anything else. 

This week has been disastrous. Even though drinks with James had been the least abhorrible of the three dates, Nicky can’t deny his relief at having Nile disrupt his evening plans. He thinks of the unwelcome hand on his knee, on the way each man had inserted themselves into his personal space with such ease, and can’t equate it to the way Joe leans into him as they walk. There’s no comparison between the safety he feels with Joe versus the insecurity he feels going on dates in general - with men or women. 

They make it to the stoop in front of Nicky’s building and Joe, thankfully, does not comment on the general state of disrepair the building seems to constantly exist in. He has made no further mention of Nicky moving in with him, as though he knows not to press the issue, but Nicky feels the suggestion like a weight resting on his shoulders every time he sees Joe all the same. He should say no while it is still early enough for Joe to find someone else, while it is still early enough for him to find a roommate, but he hasn’t. He both wants to and doesn’t want to and he’s caught in the middle by his own inaction. 

“This evening was fun,” Joe says. He has his phone out, and the Uber app is open, but they still have a few minutes before his ride arrives. “I’m glad you came out with us tonight.”

Nicky hesitates. For the first time in months they are outside his apartment, the night paused around them, and the moment Nicky’s been waiting for parades itself out in front of him with bells on. Joe does not look expectant, does not look anticipatory, but he looks comfortable and open. They’re both the exact same level of sober to know where they are and what they’re doing, but they’re both the exact same level of drunk to not overthink it. 

The street light overhead is flickering, on its last leg, but Nicky thinks he could see Joe’s smile in the dark. 

_ ‘It’s time to build a new house _ ,’ he thinks, although the foundation he and Joe are metaphorically standing upon has never felt so unsound. It is shifting underneath the weight of his hesitation, underneath every moment that he spends second guessing himself for what must be the hundredth time. 

“I’ve been thinking about what you said,” he says finally, and his tongue feels numb in his mouth. “It might be nice to live closer to work.”

“I’m just saying,” Joe says, holding up both his hands. “You could do better.”

“With you,” Nicky finishes for him. There’s a teasing note to his voice, but something in his stomach flips all the same. His heartbeat feels unnaturally fast. 

“With me,” Joe agrees, and his answering grin is mostly perfectly white teeth. He turns to wave at the car that pulls up to the curb, but doesn’t move away just yet. “Is that a yes? It sounds like a yes.”

“A tentative yes. One that hinges upon a thorough reading of your lease and your sworn word that you will not attempt to cook anything until we buy a fire extinguisher.”

Joe opens the door to the car with one hand and places his other over his heart. “One time, Nicolo. One time I set the microwave on fire and now every week it’s ‘Joe, please don’t boil water unsupervised.’”

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Joe,” Nicky says, instead of any of the questions that are dancing on the tip of his tongue begging to be asked. 

Joe gives Nicky another beautiful smile. “Have a good night, Nicky.”


	5. Chapter 4

Saturday morning Nicky wakes up with a lot of regrets, a miserable headache, and his alarm going off. It takes all of his willpower to pull himself out of bed and to force himself into a lukewarm shower he desperately needs. He has no clean work clothes, so he picks the least repulsive from where they’re piled on his floor and rubs them down with a wayward dryer sheet he finds in his sock drawer. It does nothing for the sauce and grease stains, but it does make them smell a little more like lavender and a little less like an old fryer, and that’s as good as it’s going to get until he has time to properly deal with his laundry. 

After his shower he makes his way into work, but stops briefly at _Felicia’s_ for coffee and breakfast for himself and Nile - who he knows had to open this morning and who is probably running entirely on fumes. There are fresh croissants just coming out of the oven that he allows himself to be tempted by and he gets his baked goods and his coffee and gets into work with time to spare. 

Nile is elbows deep in veal bones when he sits her coffee on the stainless steel countertop with a flourish. She looks like death warmed over.

“Alright, let’s get married,” she concedes, dropping everything she’s doing to turn and wash her hands. She probably doesn’t wash them long enough for it to be proper, and she definitely doesn’t dry her hands off before she’s got them wrapped around the coffee cup. She inhales the steam as though she can get a hit of caffeine purely through her lungs. 

“You look like how I feel,” Nicky tells her, taking a sip of his own coffee.

Nile raises an eyebrow at him. “Well, you look like shit, so I don’t even wanna know what I must look like. I threw up in a potted plant this morning waiting to get on the train.”

“She’s beauty, she’s grace,” Booker sings, passing by them carrying a hotel pan full of meticulously cleaned baby potatoes. He manages to just dodge the foot that Nile throws out in an attempt at tripping him. “You both look spectacular. I can’t wait to see how you’re faring around six pm.”

“Booker’s trick is to show up still drunk so that you don’t have to even worry about a hangover,” Nile says, shooting him a look that he pretends to be wounded by. “You actually don’t smell like whiskey today. What’s that about?”

“New year’s resolutions,” Booker offers, with a shrug. 

Nicky taps the side of his coffee cup. “It’s November.”

“It’s never too late to start being less shitty,” Booker tells him. He rests the hotel pan on the prep table and continues, as casual he can manage, “Also I might be fostering a dog for a few months.”

Nile inhales a breath so deep Nicky feels like the oxygen levels in the room change. 

“A _dog_?!” she says, a few octaves higher than normal. “What kind of dog? Do you have a picture? I want to see! When can I come over?”

“You’re fostering a dog in your studio apartment?” Nicky asks, raising an eyebrow. 

Booker shrugs and holds out his phone, displaying what is no doubt a mutt but what is also undoubtedly a Good Boy, and says, “I didn’t say it was a _good_ idea.”

The dog is medium size, and more fluff than teeth, and is a mix of black and white that makes it look reminiscent of a fluffy, baby cow. It has a mouthful of charging cords in its teeth and there’s destroyed cardboard in the background, but it looks unmistakably happy. 

Nile coos, as though presented with a baby of unprecedented cuteness. 

“I think it’s a great idea,” Nicky says. He reaches out to squeeze Booker’s elbow and continues, earnest, “I’m happy for you.”

“Yeah, let’s see how far I make it before I refuse to give him back,” Booker says. He bumps Nicky’s shoulder, pockets his phone, and picks the pan of potatoes back up. “Fostering is dangerous. Fostering leads to adopting.”

“I should get a dog,” Nile says, as though in agreement with something no one has said. She ignores the look Booker gives her as he moves past them to take his potatoes over to the oven. She’s gotten really good at ignoring any and all of them when the mood strikes. “What my landlord doesn’t know can’t hurt me.”

“I’m not smuggling a dog up your fire escape,” Nicky tells her, taking another sip of his coffee. He gestures with his free hand to the abandoned bones at her station and asks, “What do you have on your plate besides veal stock? What can I help with?”

“There’s ten pounds of greens simmering on the back stove and I’ve got bacon nearly finished in the first two ovens. My list is on the counter over there if you feel so inclined, but, from what Booker was complaining about earlier, you might have your hands full with your own list.”

She’s not wrong. Even though her own list is impressively long, the communal list Nicky normally pulls from has its own fair share of tasks. It looks almost like Andy has gone through and tweaked the menu again, which is annoying but not at all out of character, but at least the amount of garnish-work seems to have dwindled some since last week. If Nicky has to carve any more shapes out of mushrooms he’s going to develop an allergy. 

Booker has already made an impressive dent in the list, but there are a couple of tell-tale signs that he’s been cherry picking what he’s willing to do. There are still plenty of vegetables that need dicing and chopping, because Booker always avoids knife work like it’s his day job, and Nicky decides it's as good a place as any to get started. 

After she’s finished with her veal stock Nile does pause working on her own list long enough to make them a greasy, bacon-infused breakfast that Nicky scarfs down in far too few bites. She also makes them more coffee, on the ancient coffee machine that Quyhn keeps in the office (because, between the three of them, they’ve never managed to figure out how to use the intricate machine the servers use to make coffee for customers) and that doesn’t hurt either. The food and the caffeine are enough to push him through the morning and he skips lunch in order to have an extra half hour to curl his long legs up in one of the dining room booths to get in his daily work nap. 

He’s still asleep when Andy slides into the seat across from him and props her feet up next to his ribcage with a flourish. He wakes with a start and sits up in the booth, running a hand through his messy hair. 

“At ease,” Andy says, as though she knows he’s about to confess to eight different things she doesn’t currently care about. She’s got a notepad on the table and an inkpen in hand and she looks as conniving as ever. “Did Nile drag you out last night?”

“I went voluntarily, but I have some regrets.”

“You look like the embodiment of regret. Fix your hair, at least.”

Nicky runs another hand through his hair, but he’s certain ‘fixing it’ is out of the realm of possibility at this point. He purposely makes it worse, just to watch the vein on Andy’s head throb a little in annoyance, before he lets his hand drop. 

“Go ahead,” he says, gesturing at her. “Out with it. Don’t make small talk. It’s beneath you.”

“Quyhn says it’s good for morale if I pretend to be interested in your life outside of work,” Andy tells him, but she doesn’t argue the point. She taps her notebook and says, “We need a new dessert.”

They really don’t - not with how everything has been selling - but arguing with Andy about the menu choices is a path down which madness lies and Nicky isn’t dumb enough to make that mistake anymore. He was at the start, when he was fresh in the kitchen and had never worked under Andy’s iron thumb before, but now he’s familiar with how the tyranny here works. 

Nicky yawns and scrubs over his face with one hand. “I’ve been telling you to add pecan pie for four months.”

“Pecan pie,” she repeats, narrowing her eyes, but she scribbles it down all the same. She’s always had selective hearing.“That’s actually really good. We could add some bittersweet chocolate and bacon to the topping and it would sell like crazy.”

“If only someone had mentioned it before now,” Nicky agrees, leaning his elbow on the table and propping his chin up. “Is this something you’re going to want before service tonight?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s already three,” Andy says, like she hasn’t been exactly that amount of ridiculous as recently as yesterday. “We’ll add it tomorrow.”

“Ugh,” Nicky groans, and sinks back down into the booth. 

-/-

  
  
  


It shouldn’t take long at all for Nicky to pack away what little he owns in his tiny apartment, but halfway through Monday all he has to show for it are a few filled boxes and a mess left in his wake. Going through things he hasn’t bothered to look at since he moved in makes him sink back into old thoughts - makes him wonder what it is he’s doing with his life and if this decision to move in with someone else is one that he’s about to seriously regret. There are a few sentimental trinkets and books that he brought with him from Italy and it makes him weirdly homesick in that moment, even if he is typically very rarely bothered with the idea of returning home for any amount of time. 

He misses his family, and he misses the food, but he doesn’t miss his life there. His life here is nothing to write home about, but it’s undoubtedly his. Whether or not it’s something he wants it to be remains to be seen, but at least it is something he has crafted together with his own two hands. And for all his indecisiveness the life he’s been shaping for himself is finally turning into something worthwhile. Maybe he’s still confused about his sexuality, and maybe he has no inclination to make friends outside of work, but his work he does love and he knows that’s not something everyone can say. 

Quyhn and Andy have promised to haul what little furniture he owns in their truck when moving day finally occurs, so it just leaves Nicky with all of the small things that need to be packed away. There’s still two weeks until December, but Nicky isn’t the kind to leave everything until the last minute and he knows, as Monday has already begun to show him, that it might very well take all of those two weeks for him to get any packing at all done. 

He hasn’t matched with anyone else on Tinder because he hasn’t used it since his last regretful date. It’s still on his phone, installed and taking up space like a parasite he doesn’t know how to get rid of, and sometimes he stares at it when he’s sitting on the couch and bored, but he hasn’t opened it in a while. The idea of attempting dating again after the last three tries feels daunting - feels like playing with fire - and he doesn’t know that he wants to chance it turning out even worse than before. Of course there’s always the chance it turns out better than before and he meets someone truly life changing and, to be entirely honest, there’s some strange part of him that is terrified of that happening too. 

Nicky has come to realize, as days have passed since his failed date with James, that he might be more than a little afraid of this experiment of his turning up positive results. He is more than a little afraid that he’s going to go on a date with someone and they’re going to have a great time - that the man will be charming, and handsome, and sweep him off his feet and give him no doubts about where he stands as far as sexuality goes - and that thought terrifies him. Because then what excuse does he have to keep pining after Joe? If there are other people in the world who can make him feel this way, who can set his heart racing with just a look, then how can he keep all his feelings tucked away and reserved for one man?

Just because Joe feels like someone unique, someone perfect in their own way, doesn’t mean he’s the only one who can make Nicky feel this way. Surely there is someone else capable of reaching into his chest and pulling him along by all of his heart strings without trying, without more than a warm smile and bright eyes. He shouldn’t give up looking for someone else, not even if Joe is standing always at the edge of his fingertips.

Nicky sinks down into his sofa, a small stack of books in Italian in his hands, and heaves out a heavy sigh. He pulls his phone out of his pocket and checks his messages, but his friends have been uncommonly quiet today and there are no notifications waiting for him. It’s only Monday and there’s a slim chance of making it through the next three days without Joe texting him about something - whether that be hanging out or just something absurd he’s watching that Nicky should be watching too - but suddenly Nicky can’t bear the thought of waiting. 

Maybe this is the week that Joe goes on another date with another customer who has passed him their number on a napkin. Maybe this is the week he meets back up with an ex he’s sworn off, only to rekindle something. Maybe this is the week he has something going on other than pausing to involve his supposedly heterosexual best friend in his activities. 

Nicky has a lot of regrets about the past few weeks, but none of those regrets feel particularly monumental. He should do something really, truly worth regretting.

_‘What are your plans tonight_?’ he texts Joe, before he can think better of it. 

It’s only a few seconds before he gets the reply, ‘ _Meeting the others for drinks. Aren’t you coming?’_

He hadn’t originally planned on it, not after the invitation had come from Andy herself and he knows that there’s a fine line between something he’ll regret and something Andy is suggesting he do with his evening. Still, maybe this is the sign he’s been waiting for. Maybe this is a sign he should put himself out there a little bit more. 

‘ _Where is it at again?_ ’ he asks, and tries not to wonder if this is one of those instances where hindsight is twenty twenty. 

  
  
  
  


-/-

The bar they all agree to meet at is far enough from the restaurant for Nicky to feel like he’s not commuting to work and close enough to his apartment to make him not mind taking public transportation. He meets up with Nile in their normal spot and she shows up looking more fashionable than he would probably ever be capable of in this lifetime. 

“Let me come over and pick out your outfit next time,” she offers, always willing to go out of her way to help out a friend. Her hoop earrings are particularly shiny tonight and her sneakers probably cost more than any article of clothing Nicky has ever owned. 

“It’s more of this,” Nicky tells her, gesturing to himself. He’s in his typical jeans and t-shirt, hidden underneath his closely buttoned peacoat, and there’s really not much more she could find going through his closet. Nicky likes simple, utilitarian, basic clothing and it’s all he ever buys - usually on discount, and in packages that come with a variety of three basic colors. 

“You look like you’re going thrift shopping. Tell me again how you managed to convince three separate gay men to go on a date with you. You’re a disaster.”

“Ah, ah,” Nicky says, tapping her on the nose. “You promised not to bring that up ever again so long as we both may live. Amen.”

It takes him and Nile a half hour to get to the bar, but it means their group has already commandeered a table in a dark corner. There’s a pitcher of beer already half gone, and Booker and Andy are both nursing mixed drinks with fancy garnishes, and Quyhn stands up to hug them both - a clear sign she’s already three sheets to the wind. Nile slides into the seat adjacent to Lykon, who raises his own pint glass in greeting to them both, and Nicky follows suit and takes the available seat next to her. 

“We’re in a heated debate,” Andy tells the two of them. “Best James Bond movie.”

“A ‘heated debate’,” Celeste explains, sitting down her own half empty beer glass, “but it’s really just all of us trying to convince Joe that Sean Connery is not the quintessential Bond.”

“Goldfinger is a classic movie,” Joe reasons. “You can’t tell me it’s not the first movie you think of when someone says ‘Bond.’”

“The first one I think of is the Austin Powers movie,” Quyhn says, and her expression sours just slightly when her wife snorts so deeply she inhales part of her drink. 

Booker thumps Andy on the back as she continues to choke on her drink. 

“That’s not a Bond movie,” Lykon tells her, but Quyhn just shrugs as though there’s no difference. 

It doesn’t take long for Nicky to get settled. He pours himself a pint from the pitcher on the table rather than bothering with ordering something and he makes himself comfortable listening to the conversations of his friends and coworkers as they argue their way around the table. It’s not often that the majority of them make it out like this and they do make an impressively large group - which isn’t usually Nicky’s scene, but it can’t hurt to be sociable every now and again. It’s nice to get out of his apartment, and away from the reminder that he needs to pack, and it’s nice to see these people outside of work. 

“I’ll get the next round,” Joe offers, already standing up from his chair. He grabs the tray of their collected empty glasses to take back to the bar. “Any requests?”

“Something random,” Quyhn says, finishing off the last of a pink beverage and adding her glass to the tray. “I’m on a mission to try everything.”

“She’s on a mission to destroy her liver,” Lykon corrects, and Booker and Andy snort in agreement. 

“Something random for Quyhn and more questionably cheap beer for the table,” Celeste confirms. She adds a pile of one dollar bills onto the tray and says, “Use these for me, would you? I’ve been carrying them around for a week because I don’t want to spend them and look like a stripper.”

“That’s only if you’re pulling them out of your G-string to pay for bus fare,” Nile assures her, but Joe takes the pile of money and empty glasses up to the bar all the same.

The conversation turns to work as it inevitably always does when you hang out with the people you work with. Andy always sits out those conversations - sips her drink and slips an arm around her wife - and lets them hash out their grievances and rant to their heart’s content without involving herself. 

Nicky doesn’t have anything to complain about. His work keeps him busy and his coworkers are enjoyable and he never has to deal with their clientele aside from inane requests written on tickets by servers. Sure, sometimes food gets sent back to be remade for stupid reasons, but it’s never Nicky who has to interact with the unhappy party. There’s no difference to him between making one salad eight times or making eight different salads; his paycheck and his night all end up the same way. 

The servers, justifiably, have much more to complain about. Their clientele can be absurd, especially on the weekends, and Nicky has seen all of them at the end of their rope at least once. It’s not uncommon for him to go into the walk-in to grab tomatoes or bleu cheese only to see one of them on their own phone, aggressively attempting to get their mind off of a particularly volatile table. He was a server for a few weeks - not a good one, but a server nonetheless. So he understands. 

“Heads up,” Andy says, swallowing another mouthful of whatever the neon green drink is in her hand that her wife brought her two cocktails ago. “Joe needs an extraction.”

Nicky glances over to the bar, where Joe is waiting for the bartender to finish arranging a variety of drinks and bottles onto the tray he brought with him, and feels that familiar swoop in his stomach. There’s a woman on the nearest bar stool with an arm on Joe’s elbow, as she gestures with her other hand as though in the midst of a hilarious story, and Joe laughs easily like it costs him nothing to be friendly with strangers. 

“Maybe Joe needs a wingman,” Booker suggests. His own glass has been empty for a long minute. “Maybe we shouldn’t assume he’s uninterested by default.”

“No, look at his posture,” Quyhn agrees. She’s leaning heavily into Andy’s side as though that’s all that’s keeping her upright. “That’s the stance of a man who is too polite to say ‘go fuck yourself.’”

“I’m sure he’ll appreciate that you’re all sitting here doing a play-by-play of some drunk sorority girl trying to pick him up at a bar,” Nile deadpans. “I hope this is what I have to look forward to in my time of need.”

Celeste is already pushing her chair out and standing up. She finishes off her drink and sits the glass back onto the table. “Don’t worry. I’ve got this.”

She makes her way through the crowded room and over to Joe, who she exaggerates stumbling drunkenly into and slipping an arm around his shoulders. She’s almost loud enough for them to hear her over the music and crowd, but the relaxing of Joe’s shoulders would give away her game regardless. The woman on the bar stool looks extremely put out, her hand retracting from where it was still touching Joe’s elbow, but she hasn’t completely turned back to her drink yet. 

Nicky watches Celeste work her magic and tries not to relate the situation immediately to the other night at the bar with James when Nile had done something similar to extricate him. 

Celeste returns triumphant with both Joe and his now full tray of drinks. He sits them on the table as Celeste slides back into her seat, only a little too drunk to be quite as graceful as she had been earlier. 

“That was painful to watch,” Andy says, as Joe takes his seat again. She gestures at Nicky with her drink and says, nonchalant as always, “Next time you can pretend to be madly in love with Joe instead of letting the lesbian do all the work.”

Laughter erupts at the table at the joke - and that’s what it is, just a well meaning joke. Nicky should laugh, the same way his friends are laughing, but he finds the laughter caught in his throat from where his heart is blocking the way. He tries to swallow around the sudden intense panic that wells up in his chest, that settles cold into the tips of his fingers, but he can’t. Around him the laughter dies and Booker says something about Joe being a Bond girl that gets everyone going again, but Nicky doesn’t hear it. 

All Nicky hears is the rushing, like waves, in his ears. 

‘ _Oh_ ,’ Nicky thinks to himself, temporarily stunned. ‘ _I’m in love with Joe._ ’

It at once feels like something that should come as no surprise to him, not with how his feelings have slowly been evolving over the last few months, but it hits him like a freight train nonetheless. The idea that what he thought was a passing fancy, or an innocent crush, could turn into something so viscerally meaningful leaves him momentarily breathless. His mind is swimming with the realization that it has been this serious for so long and yet has somehow festered without his knowledge. 

Nile nudges his side gently, voice quiet, and asks, “Nicky? You okay?”

The answer to that question is easily ‘probably not’, but he doesn’t want to say that sitting at a table of his friends - who haven’t noted Nile’s concern or his sudden stricken face yet, but who definitely will given any more time. He pushes his chair back and it scrapes against the floor, too loud, and interrupts the drunken argument Lykon and Quyhn are engaging in. 

All eyes turn to him and Nicky feels too hot, like he’s forgotten to take off his jacket even though it’s slung over the back of his chair. 

“I’m going to get some air,” he says, gesturing towards the side of the room, where he hopes there is some sort of door to get him out of the building. He barely registers Andy’s raised eyebrow, or Nile’s frown deepening in concern, and he makes his way around the table and through the crowds still blocking the walkways. 

Nicky makes it out one of the side doors and into the adjacent alley, where a couple of people are smoking and talking and mingling in the crisp night air. The air is cold enough that Nicky can see his breath. He stands outside the bar, with his hands tucked into the pockets of his jeans and wishes he were the type to smoke just so he could have something to do with them. He feels cold, and restless, and the crisp air does nothing to settle the nerves that are stuck moving rapid fire through his chest and stomach. 

The brick wall in the alley is filthy, but Nicky leans his back against it for some sense of stability all the same. It is abhorrently cold through the fabric of his shirt and he regrets leaving the bar without his coat. His mind is racing, like the traitorous heart in his chest. There are only two beers in him and it’s not nearly enough to make this realization palatable - not nearly enough to let it settle in him like it might if he were shit faced drunk and unable to repetitiously worry about what any of it means for him moving forward. 

Maybe he should just leave - call it a night. Maybe he should go back to his own apartment, the one that’s half in boxes waiting for him to move in with Joe - Joe, the man he’s in love with-

“Nicky?” 

Nicky opens his eyes and glances down the alley towards the sound of the voice. Stepping out of a cab with a group of friends is Robert, failed date numero uno from a week ago, staring at Nicky as though they’re long lost friends. Nicky scrubs a hand across his face, as though hoping to have his vision cleared, but the scene continues to play out in front of him like a joke. 

Robert says something to his friends, who head into the bar without him, and makes his way down the alley, past the smokers and minglers, to where Nicky is. 

“I thought that was you! Hey, how’ve you been?” Robert leans forward and gives him a limp armed hug that Nicky returns out of bewilderment more than anything. When he pulls away he is smiling hugely, as though his entire evening has turned around. “You look great!”

“Hello again,” Nicky says, at a loss for what else to say. There’s no way for him to step any further away with the brick wall to his back, but Robert is standing in his personal bubble like it’s somewhere he’s been invited to be. 

“Hey, you know, I had a great time the other night - I don’t, I don’t know if you got my message, I know phones are weird sometimes,” Robert continues, scratching the back of his neck. “But yeah, I was hoping we would see each other again and now here we are! You’re not leaving, are you? Let me buy you a drink, at least.”

“Robert, dinner the other night was….” Nicky pauses, trying desperately to imagine something he can say that wouldn’t disappoint his mother and settles on, “something. I should have replied to your message, but some things came up-”

“Oh yeah, we all get busy, it’s no big deal,” Robert waves a hand dismissively, like it’s already water under their proverbial bridge. 

There’s a flash of familiar gold hoops in the window of the door leading into the bar and Nicky thinks, suddenly intensely grateful for her meddling, ‘ _Nile._ ’

Nile could not have better timing to come after him, even if he had originally thought he hadn’t wanted to be followed. Her unapologetic insertion into his life could not come at a better time. 

“I got married,” he blurts, eyes glancing towards the door again as it opens. He’s expecting his fake wife to show up at any point now, but that’s not what happens at all. 

Instead what happens is that the door opens and he catches a glimpse of Nile further in the building, too far to be the one who opened the door. She catches his eye and shoots him an exasperated look, one she has plenty of experience at by now. Instead of coming out into the alley to give him a piece of her mind or to save him again, she turns her back and walks out of his line of sight. Which leaves him to realize it had been Joe who had opened the door and walked figuratively into Nicky’s poorly thought scheme. 

Right on cue, Joe moves into the alley, the door swinging shut behind him, and says, “Everything okay, Nicky?”

‘ _Nile is right_ ,’ Nicky thinks to himself. ‘ _I am a disaster._ ’

Robert’s eyes are wide and he looks from Joe back to Nicky. He says, incredulous, “It’s only been a week since our date! You got _married_?!”

Nicky, who has always been raised on the idiom _in for a penny, in for a pound_ , shrugs with tense shoulders and says, like it’s no big deal, “I said something came up.”

“I guess I severely underestimated how seriously you were looking. I should have brought flowers or something,” Robert mutters, but takes a generous step out of Nicky’s personal space all the same. He fixes Joe with a friendly look, which Joe returns entirely out of reflex, and says, “Well played, my good man. You play a competitive game.”

Joe glances between the two of them, as though hoping something will click, but it’s obvious from the sideways glance he shoots Nicky that he’s completely lost. Still, he’s always been good at rolling with the punches. 

“It’s the only way to play,” Joe says, clapping Robert on the shoulder. “What did I miss?”

Robert relaxes, which is more than Nicky can say for himself. This is not what he had in mind when he set out to do things worth regretting. He had meant declarations of intent, or perhaps inviting Joe out to do something one might be able to mistake as a date, and nowhere in any of that was there room for running into failed prior dates or faking a marriage out of panic.

“Nicky was just telling me congratulations are in order for the two of you,” Robert says, and he really is being a surprisingly good sport about the entire thing. “I should buy the two of you a drink to celebrate!” and here he turns to look at Joe again before he says, plowing right on ahead, “It’s the least I can do for hitting on your husband.”

At the word ‘husband’ Nicky visibly flinches before he can stop himself. He can feel the color draining from his face.

Joe clicks his tongue, but says nothing. He doesn’t have to say anything. Nicky can already see all the pieces slotting themselves into place in front of his eyes. Joe is nothing if not perceptive and, it doesn’t matter how convoluted Nicky’s plan was, it was only a matter of time before he caught on. 

“We were actually heading out,” Nicky tells Robert, holding up his wrist as though checking for the time - even though he’s not wearing a watch. “Long day tomorrow of changing my name and moving to another country. It was lovely to see you again, Robert. Enjoy the rest of your evening.”

Joe catches him by the belt loop of his pants and Nicky just barely resists the urge to stomp on his foot in retaliation. 

“Nonsense, dearest!” Joe says, and Nicky has a lot of regrets. A lot of them. “Let us have a drink with your old friend Robert. We can regale him with tales of our sordid affair.”

“I’m going to strangle you in your sleep,” Nicky mutters to him, but his threats fall upon deaf ears. 

“I do love a good story,” Robert says, and opens the door to the bar for the three of them.


End file.
